In a recent post, Update on LXX Progress, I talked about the possibility of putting together a crowd-sourcing tool to help share the load of clarifying some parse code errors in the CATSS LXX morphological analysis. Last Friday, Patrick Altman and I spent an evening of hacking and built the tool.
Back at BibleTech 2010, I gave a talk about Django, Pinax, and some early ideas for a platform built on them to do collaborative corpus linguistics. Patrick Altman was my main co-developer on some early prototypes and I ended up hiring him to work with me at Eldarion.
The original project was called oxlos after the betacode transcription of the Greek word for “crowd”, a nod to “crowd-sourcing”. Work didn’t continue much past those original prototypes in 2010 and Pinax has come a long way since so, when we decided to work on oxlos again, it made sense to start from scratch. From the initial commit to launching the site took about six hours.
At the moment there is one collective task available—clarifying which of a set of parse codes is valid for a given verb form in the LXX—but as the need for others arises, it will be straightforward to add them (and please contact me if you have similar tasks you’d like added to the site).
If you’re a Django development, you are welcome to contribute. The code is open source under an MIT license and available at https://github.com/jtauber/oxlos2. We have lots we can potentially add beyond merely different kinds of tasks.
If your Greek morphology is reasonably strong, I invite you to sign up at
and help out with the LXX verb parsing task.
It’s probably not that relevant anymore, but you can watch the original 2010 talk below. I’d skip past the Django / Pinax intro and go straight to about 37:00 where I start to discuss the collective intelligence platform.