Exactly three months ago to the day, I announced that Seumas Macdonald and I were working on a corrected, open, digital edition of the Apostolic Fathers based on Lake. That initial work is now complete.
Preparing an Open Apostolic Fathers discussed the original motivation and the rather detailed process we went through.
The corrected raw text files are available on GitHub at https://github.com/jtauber/apostolic-fathers but I also generated a static site at https://jtauber.github.io/apostolic-fathers/ to browse the texts. The corrections will be contributed back to the OGL First1KGreek project.
The next step for us will be to lemmatise the text and there has already been some interest from others in getting the English translation corrected and aligned as well.
Recall that, while we were essentially correcting the Open Greek and Latin text, we used the CCEL text and that in Logos to identify particular places to look at in the printed text. We did this by lining up the CCEL, OGL and Logos texts and seeing where any of them disagreed. Those became the places we went back to, in multiple scans of the printed Lake, to make our corrections to the base text we started with from OGL.
How often did each of those three “witnesses” disagree? Here are some stats. A = CCEL, B = OGL, C = Logos. And so AB/C is where CCEL and OGL agreed against Logos, AC/B is where CCEL and Logos agreed against OGL, A/BC is where OGL and Logos agreed against CCEL, and A/B/C is where all three disagreed.
| FILE | AB/C | AC/B | A/BC | A/B/C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | 1.29% | 1.15% | 7.97% | 0.32% |
| 002 | 0.76% | 1.20% | 3.39% | 0.37% |
| 003 | 1.58% | 2.20% | 4.97% | 0.28% |
| 004 | 0.57% | 1.33% | 7.01% | 0.28% |
| 005 | 1.05% | 1.79% | 6.21% | 0.84% |
| 006 | 0.88% | 1.18% | 7.54% | 0.69% |
| 007 | 0.39% | 0.88% | 3.34% | 0.20% |
| 008 | 0.79% | 0.87% | 5.41% | 0.44% |
| 009 | 0.25% | 1.53% | 2.68% | 0.38% |
| 010 | 0.44% | 4.05% | 4.36% | 0.25% |
| 011 | 0.36% | 1.86% | 4.23% | 0.14% |
| 012 | 0.92% | 1.15% | 5.59% | 0.43% |
| 013 | 1.29% | 0.90% | 6.08% | 0.34% |
| 014 | 1.25% | 0.34% | 4.91% | 0.08% |
| 015 | 0.96% | 0.65% | 6.74% | 0.50% |
| TOTAL | 1.11% | 1.12% | 5.98% | 0.34% |
One can immediately see CCEL diverged the most from the others (it had considerable lacunae for a start). The numbers involving Logos diverging are probably overly high because there was a weird systemic error we only noticed after work had started that a middle dot was often erroneously added after eta. This ultimately didn’t affect anything other than perhaps flagging places Seumas and I had to check that we otherwise wouldn’t have needed to.
But at the end of the day, how much did we change? How much of the OGL original remained? How similar was our result to the text on CCEL? And for a bit of fun, how often was my first correction and Seumas’s first correction the same as what we ended up with after consensus was achieved? Here’s the breakdown by work:
| FILE | CCEL | OGL | JT | SM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | 91.27% | 99.02% | 99.85% | 99.91% |
| 002 | 96.02% | 98.90% | 99.77% | 99.90% |
| 003 | 94.58% | 97.63% | 99.77% | 99.60% |
| 004 | 92.42% | 98.48% | 99.91% | 100.00% |
| 005 | 92.32% | 98.32% | 99.79% | 99.89% |
| 006 | 91.28% | 98.82% | 98.82% | 99.80% |
| 007 | 96.07% | 98.92% | 99.90% | 99.90% |
| 008 | 93.89% | 99.30% | 100.00% | 99.91% |
| 009 | 96.82% | 99.75% | 98.60% | 99.87% |
| 010 | 94.94% | 96.27% | 99.87% | 99.68% |
| 011 | 95.04% | 98.54% | 99.77% | 99.91% |
| 012 | 93.86% | 98.78% | 99.87% | 99.90% |
| 013 | 93.15% | 99.20% | 99.87% | 99.83% |
| 014 | 94.90% | 99.62% | 99.92% | 99.74% |
| 015 | 92.69% | 99.16% | 99.96% | 99.62% |
| TOTAL | 93.32% | 98.97% | 99.83% | 99.84% |
You just beat me Seumas :-)