Timothy Finney, Computer-Oriented Transcription, Collation and Analysis of the New Testament Manuscript Tradition (Starting with Hebrews)
A workable computer-oriented transcription system needs to be devised as a first step in making all biblical manuscripts available through the World Wide Web. Lessons learned through transcribing manuscripts of the Epistle to the Hebrews are related, along with musings on the essential characteristics of a good transcription system. Computers can collate computer-oriented transcriptions to produce a compact representation of the corpus. With computer-oriented collations in hand, various modes of analysis can be applied to discover textual relationships. I outline one approach that has proven fruitful. A form of multivariate analysis called classical scaling is applied to produce maps that show manuscript relationships from the dual perspectives of spelling and text. Configurations evident in the maps are often consistent with the known historical circumstances of their constituent texts, suggesting that the maps are reliable guides when known histories are lacking. Similar patterns of clustering are seen in the textual and spelling perspectives even though they are based on separate data sets. The similarity must therefore be due to a common underlying influence. One possible explanation of the results associates clusters with Christian population centres.
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