Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Form for Comparing Ancient Texts

Here's a great web site I ran across recently:

Form for Comparing Ancient Texts

It's designed by Kenneth Banner , a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. Basically, it generates up to four frames allowing you to compare the ancient texts of your choice -- just tick the boxes and press "Create Frame". The site uses existing texts hosted elsewhere on the web. In one way that is a disadvantage: it means one has to keep a careful eye on the URLs of the texts linked (e.g. Thomas appears to be down because Banner has linked to a now defunct URL); but in another way it is a great advantage -- a properly "collaborative" effort, drawing on different sites on the net and not waiting to transcribe texts afresh. None of the texts are tagged by pericope (contrast John Marshall's Five Gospels Parallels) and all are English translations, but I can imagine this site being pretty useful; and I can imagine others doing similar things.

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