A full-text edition of Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha

Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha is a text that virtually everyone who works in Christian Apocrypha has dealt with at one point or another. It isn’t overly difficult to find in print, most decent academic libraries will have a copy, and several different PDF editions are even available on archive.org. The PDF editions, however, are basically pictures of pages.

What if there was a high-quality full-text edition of Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha available? Not just available, but openly available for scholars to use in whatever research or digital humanities projects they were involved in? And not just the Latin and Greek text, but the apparatuses too?

We’re closer to that than we have ever been. If you’ve worked with Evangelia Apocrypha, you know that the Greek text uses a distinctive font. This font makes optical character recognition (OCR) difficult because it isn’t like other Greek fonts. However, Bruce Robertson of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick has been working on the problem of Greek OCR (see his project Heml, Historic Event Markup and Linking) and wanted to try and OCR this volume. Rick Brannan provided him some training data based on Rick’s corrected transcription of Tischendorf’s Acts of Pilate A, and Bruce loaded it up in his environment.

The result is now available in Bruce’s Greek OCR Challenge. The interface places the page scan on the left and the OCR’d text on the right. It allows for relatively pain free correction of the OCR’d material. You can see (and edit!) the material in Bruce’s Greek OCR Challenge editing environment.

There is a lot of material to correct, however, to make it all happen. Consider this the call for volunteers to review and correct as much text as possible. This call is open, anyone with interest and ability is invited to contribute.

Please spread the word among your respective academic and personal networks.

(Via Rick Brannan)