2020-2021 Faculty Research Grants

Oliver Glanz (Old Testament)

Publication of New Testament Greek and Septuagint as TextFabric Database.

The proposed project aims at making available the scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament and the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint) for the TextFabric research platform (TF). In doing so the rich search capabilities of TextFabric as well as the python-based data-analysis tools – the standard of today’s digital humanities – will become available for linguistic, philological, and exegetical research.
In doing so, this project seeks to respond to the need of making state-of-the-art open(-source) linguistic research tools available for the study of biblical Greek texts. The necessity of breaking scholarly texts free from their enclosure in proprietary and commercial Bible Software has been expressed loudly, clearly, and repetitively at scholarly meetings for the last 10 years (at annual SBL meetings and elsewhere). The main rationale for this request has to do with the very limited data analysis tools provided by commercial BibleSoftware. The gap between search functionality and data analysis tools offered by BibleSoftware and the search functionality, data mining, and data-visualization abilities of the open-source phyton environment is constantly growing. With the development of TF as a widely recognized open-source tool for the analysis of ancient text corpora (see project description and methodology) and with the availability of the public domain and/or open licenses for scholarly biblical Greek texts, it is now possible to unleash the latest state-of-the-art analytic tools on the Greek Old Testament and the Greek New Testament.
With this project, the needs of biblical and Greek scholars who have asked for the combination of TF and Greek texts will be addressed for the first time.