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Greek Texts to Digitize

Posted: December 5th, 2011, 3:19 pm
by EricSowell
Hey everybody. Being the slacker that I am, with the exception of the NT I've pretty much let my greek reading slide for the last year as I spent my time professional interests (employed as a web developer). I'm sure I'm the first :)

A while back I tried to employ some people to do some digitization of Greek texts. Unfortunately none of them came through. Recently a couple people have seen the old posts and have shown interest. I'm still willing to fund some digitization but haven't been keeping up with what has come available in the last year. I'm doing this for research and knowledge's sake and not for any particular texts that I'm wanting so I'm open to suggestions. Anyone know of a text that they'd like to see public but currently isn't available, digitized and under a public domain license? Anything Hellenistic will do for me, Christian or otherwise.

If you have a text in mind and know of a non-unicode-digitized source (perhaps a pdf with scanned images or something), post a note about the work with a link to it.

Oh, BTW, I recently did get my Greek reading back on track :)

Re: Greek Texts to Digitize

Posted: May 5th, 2012, 3:34 am
by Nigel Chapman
A great ongoing project would be keeping the latest out-of-copyright Greek texts of the Old and New Testaments not just online under a CreativeCommons license that ensures maximum reuse, but morphologically parsed as well. I've been developing software to take text in a Wiki and assist with the identification of parsing. Let me know, on or off list, if that's the sort of thing you had in mind.

Re: Greek Texts to Digitize

Posted: May 5th, 2012, 3:09 pm
by Jonathan Robie
If I had to pick three things to make freely available, they would be:
All are available in PDFs.

I don't think you have to get the morphology done in the first pass. That can be added later. Just getting a high quality text-based version of the above resources is very useful.

Last year, I discussed this with someone who digitalizes texts professionally at a university, and he said that they send a lot of their texts to be digitized in India. His experience is that they do great work at reasonable prices, and it gets things done quickly.

I've heard people on the list talk about the results they have gotten with OCR used on these kinds of materials. Anyone want to share?

I'd like to be involved in things like this. In most open source projects, it's important that collaboration be set up carefully, so that:
  • It's clear how decisions are made
  • Copyright status is clearly agreed to from the beginning
  • Materials are always visible
  • etc.
I wonder who would be interested in help start an initiative like this?

Re: Greek Texts to Digitize

Posted: May 5th, 2012, 5:03 pm
by Nigel Chapman
Pencil me in for transcription and (if needed) for infrastructure, so long as the end product is CC-BY-SA or something similarly open. A big lexicon is the other thing, but LSJ from Perseus already fills that gap nicely (though condensing it to sensible glosses for quick reference would be useful).

Re: Greek Texts to Digitize

Posted: May 5th, 2012, 7:41 pm
by Louis L Sorenson
I've been partnering with someone on Abbott-Smith, but am currently in a standstill with my partner because of overload at his end. I do have a database of the words in Abbott-Smith.

Re: Greek Texts to Digitize

Posted: May 6th, 2012, 9:13 am
by Jonathan Robie
Based on my email inbox, it sounds like I may be joining the Abbot-Smith team. Watch this space.