Newsletter Highlights - July 2022

1. The Statistical Restoration (SR) Greek New Testament is progressing nicely and the next release of it has been updated on the CNTR website. The algorithm has been slightly improved and this version is now about 1.4% words different than the Nestle-Aland 28th edition (only about 1% different if the expert override function is turned on). Many thanks to all who helped spot various issues and offered suggestions for improvement. This latest SR beta version is now considered Release Candidate 1, which means that unless some other issues are found, this will later become the production version of the text that is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. The technical details of how it was generated are discussed in a paper that I later plan to submit to a peer reviewed journal. I think I am finally beginning to see the light at the end tunnel!

2. The CNTR collation has been updated to fix a few bugs and to now only show one verse at a time. Some users may be annoyed by this because they were used to scrolling though a chapter, but this had been planned for a while in preparation for when additional information will be added to each verse making load times too long. To compensate, the arrow buttons now advance a verse at a time and if you click and hold them down, it moves much quicker through the verses than scrolling. In addition, a set of key strokes were added to move forward or backward by a book, chapter, or a verse. The documentation for this is shown if you click on the information icon.

3. The CNTR Project Overview and Technical Reference documents have been updated to better reflect the ongoing operations of the CNTR. As you will see, the vision of the CNTR extends beyond textual criticism and providing an open-licensed Greek New Testament. Hopefully, some other types of data will be ready to be released later this year.

4. I attended the International Conference on Computing and Mission (ICCM) in June. It was a good opportunity to network with others in related fields and I was able to give a brief presentation of the CNTR in an ad hoc session.

5 The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) has accepted my presentation entitled “Considerations for Statistical Reconstruction of the Original Orthography of the New Testament” in the Biblical Lexicography session for the upcoming conference in November. Assuming we know what words belong in the Greek New Testament, it explores how the computer might assist in statistically determining how those words might have originally been spelled. This will mark the 5th paper presented at SBL meetings in the last year.