Open Scriptures

The exciting news this week is the dialogue that Weston has been carrying on with Dr. Bertram Salzmann from the German Bible Society. In a nutshell, we are working together to create a developer platform that will give access to the copyrighted texts that GBS maintains (such as the renown UBS GNT) along with other openly-licensed works already available online. The conceptual outline that Dr. Salzmann has proposed keeps GBS’s texts under their umbrella by means of hosting the texts and the applications that make use of them. This is somewhat different than the original idea that Weston proposed in which Open Scriptures would be more of a true mediator between open source developers and content providers like GBS. In any case, the applications would be made available free of charge. The exact details have yet to be figured out. Many thanks to Dr. Salzmann and GBS for their innovative forward-thinking proposal! Please help by joining in on the conversation!

The past few weeks on Open Scriptures have seen some steady progress.  Of note is that the Tregelles GNT import script is near completion.  The addition of this manuscript will be much appreciated as it will bring the total number of works in the Manuscript Comparator to six. In addition to New Testament improvements, David Troidl submitted the initial upload of Strong’s Hebrew data (XML).  This first step is the outcome of very hard work and also good collaboration on our Google group. Lastly, we are working on porting all of our code into a Django/Pinax friendly format so that we can switch our site as well as our applications over to this platform.  The progress here is moving along and within a couple weeks we should be on our new server using our new platform graciously donated by James Tauber of MorphGNT and Eldarion.  If anyone has experience with Django/Pinax and would be willing to help out please contact Weston via the Google Group.

There has also been some significant steps forward in the dialog between Weston and the German Bible Society; GBS has a tentative proposal which looks to be quite promising and beneficial for both communities. Look forward to an announcement hopefully next week.

Welcome to Open Scriptures Roundup!  This is the first instalment of what will be a weekly synopsis of what’s been going on at Open Scriptures.  The goal is to keep everyone who is interested updated on the status of the projects we are working on as well as provide information that can point out where help is needed.

This week we have made a lot of exciting progress.  For starters, the manuscript import and build scripts have been completely ported over to Python and tested!  This is a huge first step as it now allows us to work on creating applications that manipulate these manuscripts.  Weston is currently working on creating a Django app of the Manuscript Comparator.  If you would like to checkout the code follow the steps listed here.

Tregelles’s Greek New Testament Released!  Joyfully, we can report that the project has released the texts under the Creative Commons 3.0 Protocol (that is, CC BY-NC-SA).  This is very good news for Biblical Studies and especially for Open Scriptures.  The initial announcement is here.  The downloads may be accessed here.  Weston is working on updating the import and merge scripts to include these texts.

Lastly, there has been some very productive collaboration going on regarding Strong’s data.  For more information see the thread here, and another thread here.

To keep yourself abreast of all the news going on join the Open Scriptures Google Group.

See ya next week!