Non-CrossWire Text-Development Projects

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Introduction

The CrossWire Bible Society's purpose is to develop Bible software. Part of what makes great software is the availability of great content: Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, atlases, and other books. CrossWire depends on the availability of great content produced by others--we generally do not produce our own original content.

Other projects around the Web have been started to produce electronic editions of texts that we would love to see incorporated into SWORD. The following are a list of links to such projects. Involvement in these projects does not usually require a great deal of technical expertise, so we strongly encourage people who want to help SWORD improve but who don't feel prepared to contribute by writing code to contribute their time and work to these projects.

Some of these projects have a limited scope (perhaps just one book) while others serve as repositories for massive collections of texts. All links are just suggestions. If you find additional projects or particular works being produced by those projects, please add them to the list.

Other Ministries

This section lists other ministries involved in Bible Text Development & Preservation geared to supporting agencies such as Bible Societies.

  • The Bible For The Future – This MissionAssist project arose out of their concern that, if digital information is not properly preserved, it could easily disappear! This is particularly true of Scripture that has been transcribed (or "keyboarded") into a digital format, used in the preparation of a particular translation, and then filed away in its original format rather than being stored in a server online.

Individual Works

  • The Codex Sinaiticus Project http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/
    This is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript. See also [1] for details of the intended complete electronic edition, using and developing software pioneered by Peter Robinson of the University of Birmingham.
  • TanakhML Project [1] aims at providing scholars with efficient tools for travelling over the Bible in Hebrew, as well as with a common descriptive language for describing the structure of the Bible according to the Jewish masoretic tradition. TanakhML is thus, stricto sensu, that specific language, described according to the XML meta-language, used to express the structure of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh (Tanach), as formalised by the Jewish tradition, or Masorah. Content is provided under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. The online Hebrew text is Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
  • The English Hexapla 1841 http://bible.zoxt.net/hex/hex.htm – Greek New Testament according to Scholtz with 6 ancient English translations: Wiclif 1380, Tyndale 1534, Cranmer 1539, Geneva 1557, Rheims 1582, Authorised 1611
  • Mount Sinai Arabic Codex 151 – as described in [2] Need to find out the current status of this project.
  • The Clementine Vulgate Text Project – The Clementine Text Project was an effort between 2002 and 2005 to create a free online text version of the Clementine Vulgate. This is an historically important edition of the Latin Bible that previously did not exist in electronic form. The text has been released into the public domain.
  • Open English Bible – a completely free modern English translation of the Bible. The OEB is under a Creative Commons Zero licence.

Collections

  • Nordic (Scandinavian) literature (including some Bibles, etc)
  • Several historic Bibles and other important books have been digitized by the web-master, Yves Petrakian.
  • Some significant historic Bibles and translations are hosted on this French site. (Domain expired; use wayback.)
  • The Project is dedicated to republishing the extensive literary efforts of the Reverend Matthew Poole (1624-79). The cornerstone of the project is the translation of Poole's massive Synopsis Criticorum (Synopsis of Interpreters), making it available in English for the first time. This is an ongoing translation project. The translation work is being undertaken by Pastor Steven Dilday. He holds a Ph.D. Degree in Puritan History and Literature from Whitefield Theological Seminary. This work was drawn to my attention by reading Victor Perry's review in The Banner of Truth magazine (issue 547, April 2009). So far the first 5 volumes have been translated. These are available in print through Lulu.com, or to purchase as downloads at much lower cost. There are some samples available as free downloads.
  • The National Yiddish Book Center is a non-profit organization working to rescue Yiddish books and share their content with the world. More than 10,000 of our titles are now available free-of-charge through the Open Content Alliance.
This site has three collections of English Bibles:
  • Public Domain Bibles - hosted by the site
  • More Public Domain Bibles - hosted elsewhere
  • Copyright Bibles - hosted elsewhere
Some of those in the first collection are translations that I have not seen hosted elsewhere. Among the more unusual digitized texts are the following:
  • Anglo-Saxon Gospels - Manuscript 140, Corpus Christi College - circa 1000 by Aelfric
  • Anglo-Saxon Gospels - Hatton Manuscript 38, Bodleian Library - circa 1200 by unknown author
  • Wycliffe Bible - 1395 by John Wycliffe (66 books)
  • Calvin Bible - 1855 by Calvin Translation Society (Joshua, Psalms, Isaiah to Malachi, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews to 1 John, Jude)
  • Revised Version, also called English Revised Version, 1885 Charles Ellicott editor
  • The New Testament: Revised and Translated 1904 by Adolphus Worrell
  • The New Testament: Translated from the Original Greek 1858 by Leicester Sawyer
  • The New Testament: Translated from the Sinaitic Manuscript 1918 by Henry Anderson
None of the hosted translations include any deuterocanonical books, even though (for example) the 1885 Revised Version included the Apocrypha.
This site is an electronic library of historic Orthodox Christian resources in the indigenous languages of Alaska. Included in this site are printed texts in the Aleut, Alutiiq, Tlingit, and Yup'ik languages. Among these are some translations of the Holy Gospels.
As part of the Corpus Scriptorum Cataloniae series, the Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum will include a critical edition of all known Catalan translations of the Bible or texts directly related to it, published or unpublished, from the thirteenth century until the year 1900. On the website of the Associació Bíblica de Catalunya
This is a private website maintained by Ulrich Stiehl in Germany. The other Sanskrit documents include Bible in Sanskrit (Gospel of Matthew in Sanskrit Translation)[4].
The Massachusetts Bible Society Collection contains over 4,000 items, which include: Bibles, parts of Bibles, and tracts. Many of the Bibles in the collection are being documented for the first time in the ongoing cataloging project. The Bibles are important, not only as sacred texts, but as a record of the people who produced them, received them, and those who were transformed by the message. See the Rare Bibles Exhibition at the Boston University School of Theology Library.
View a statistical list of the language groups cataloged thus far in the project.
Project Gezelius is a Nordic project which has reached its aim to put out the 4200 pages of extensive biblical works from the 1700s into a web database.
Cuneiform Circle is a community of scholars engaged in the study of the Old Babylonian Akkadian. Their main goal is to create an Old Babylonian Text Corpus, an Old Babylonian Dictionary, and a List of Old Babylonian Cuneiform Signs.
The object of the project is to gather together textual evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages and to produce a corpus in digital and print form. See this University of Cambridge news item [5].
  • The Oxford Text Archive – browsing the catalogue I came across The Apostolic Fathers and the Hanga NT.
  • The Chinese Text Project – is a web-based e-text system designed to present ancient Chinese texts.
  • From the University of Zurich, Zwingli’s theological treatises can be accessed here and his letters here.
  • Glaubensstimme - Das evangelische Archiv im Internet – We have been offered more or less the whole of Glaubensstimme archive for CrossWire. RefDoc has had a look at it - it is in essence a huge repository of German language texts, probably similar size as CCEL and would if we could work with it probably in one go double what we have in modules overall. Or more. Much of it is of huge quality - both theological and format wise. Most, but a few texts seem GenBook material. Commentaries and a couple of Bible translations are there too.

Catalogues

  • Bible Research – The site is for Bible students who are looking for detailed information on the history of the canon, texts, and versions of Scripture.

Specialist Societies

  • The Tyndale Society – The Society exists for all who are interested in the work and influence of William Tyndale. William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. Forbidden to work in England, Tyndale translated and printed in English the New Testament and half the Old Testament between 1525 and 1535 in Germany and the Low Countries. He worked from the Greek and Hebrew original texts when knowledge of those languages in England was rare. His pocket-sized Bible translations were smuggled into England, and then ruthlessly sought out by the Church, confiscated and destroyed. Condemned as a heretic, Tyndale was strangled and burned outside Brussels in 1536. Of particular note, a complete Tyndale Bible concordance is now almost complete.

Online Resources

  • Translatable Exegetical Tools – TExT is short for Translatable Exegetical Tools. We desire to facilitate the development of freely distributable and translatable tools for biblical exegesis to serve the global church.
  • Digital Editing of Medieval Manuscripts – a joint training programme between Charles University in Prague, Queen Mary University of London, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the University of Siena, and the library of the Klosterneuburg Monastery. It equips advanced MA and PhD students in medieval studies with the necessary skills to edit medieval texts and work in a digital environment.

Dictionaries

  • The Kamusi Project is a participatory international effort dedicated to improving knowledge of the world's languages. Our long-term mission is to produce dictionaries and other language resources for every language, and to make those resources available everywhere to everyone. Our initial focus is the languages of Africa. Africa's one billion people speak about 2000 languages.

Software

  • Greenstone Digital Library Software – Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read the Greenstone Factsheet for more information.
  • SHEBANQ – System for HEBrew Text: ANnotations for Queries and Markup – Scholarly editions of the Bible usually dedicate space to a critical apparatus and various kinds of annotations. We introduce the idea of annotating the text with queries. They show up next to the chapters where the results are. Of course you can also share your hand-written annotations! SHEBANQ is a search engine for the Hebrew Bible, powered by the ETCBC4 linguistic database, formerly know as WIVU. The data is archived for open access, and the program code is open source. For further details, see About SHEBANQ.

Libraries (general)

The following powerful inter-library search engines are useful as aids for general research.:

  • HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Projects

  • The Wulfila project – a small digital library dedicated to the study of the Gothic language and Old Germanic languages in general. Our primary goal is to provide linguistically annotated editions that can be downloaded in TEI format or browsed online, linked to a digital glossary, POS-tags and interlinear translations. The focus is currently on the Gothic Bible and minor fragments; ...
  • The Text Creation Partnership creates standardized, accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early print books. We transcribe and mark up the text from the millions of page images in ProQuest's Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage's Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex's Evans Early American Imprints. This work, and the resulting text files, are jointly funded and owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide. All of the TCP's work will be released the public domain for anyone to use.
  • The TITUS Projekt (Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text und Sprachmaterialien) – The TITUS server is a joint project of the Institute of Comparative Linguistics of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, the Ústav starého Predního východu a srovnávací jazykovedy of Charles University, Prague, the Institut for Almen og Anvendt Sprogvidenskab of the University of Kopenhagen and the Departamento de Filología Clásica y Románica (Filología Griega) de la Universidad de Oviedo.

On GitHub

  • Volunteers at Free Bibles India are digitizing several public domain Indian language Bible translations. David is in contact with them and collaborating on one project.
  • Project GITenberg – a Free and Open, Collaborative, Trackable and Scriptable digital library. It leverages the power of the Git version control system and the collaborative potential of Github to make books more open.

References

  1. ↑ Dead link reported on 2012-10-22.
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