Creating personalized texts

[Jared1260]

For my dissertation research I need to create unique texts while retaining the full functionality of Accordance--searches, full analyses, etc. Is there a way to do this? (I dearly hope!) 

 

Is it possible to tweak the texts before performing analyses, selecting textual variants for example? I am going to be making changes to the NA28 version of Matthew. Is there a way to incorporate those changes before I use the Accordance tools? 

 

The purpose of my dissertation is to reconstruct the version of Mark used by Matthew (Mk^Mt). Ideally I would like to be able to enter this text and then analyze that text. I know Joe Weaks did this with his reconstruction of "MarQ". 

 

Relatedly, is it possible to break down verses into a, b, c etc? Does Accordance recognize those subsections, or would I need to create that text manually? 

 

This is an example of the breakdown I have performed. Here I refined Aland's pericope #146 that covers Matthew 14:13-21.

 

Aland lines up Matthew 14.13-21/Mark 6:32-44/Luke 9.10b-17. 

 

Here is my detailed breakdown:

 

Matthew 13a,21b contains M material

Mt 14.13b-21a aligns with Mk 6.32-34ac, 35-44 and Luke 9.10b-17

Mk 6:34b contains content unique to Mark. 

 

As I said, ideally I would like to use my version of Matthew, but most importantly I wish to create unique texts for each category: Triple Tradition (3), Matthew's material (M), Content unique to Mark (Mk), and perhaps Q. Analyses on Matthew and Mark are the most important for my research--those are the only gospels I am analyzing directly. 

 

Thank you very much for your assistance. 

Edited May 11, 2015 by Jared1260

[Joel Brown]

Jared, I am certainly far from the best person to respond here, but I'm hoping to at least get some discussion going

 

You are certainly pushing the capabilities of the program a good bit!  In theory what you'd want to work with is a User Bible, but there are many roadblocks that I can think of.

 

I'll detail the difficulties that I see below, with potential solutions:

 

1) You say you want the full functionality of Accordance - searches and full analyses.  If you are referring to morphological searches, then this simply isn't possible.  The only morphological databases (including lemma vs inflected distinction and roots) are our own published texts, so any searching in your text would have to be done by inflected form.  I highly doubt this restriction will be changing in the near future.

 

2) Since you want to do this with the NA28, you will run into another problem with the fact your language is Greek.  Right now we only support either MacRoman (aka Latin) characters, or as full Unicode.  Using Unicode you'll be able to import, display, and search your Greek, but it won't be able to do a text compare with our NA28 text, and you won't be able to perform analysis on it.  Fortunately, we have two fixes planned to improve both of these in the near future:  a] Support analysis on Unicode texts, and b] Support converting an imported fully Greek text into our standard Greek formatting, allowing better analysis and text comparison.

 

3) I'm not entirely following how you plan to incorporate the split verses into Accordance.  You are free to place whatever markers you like in the text, such as [a] or (a), but Accordance does not automatically parse them, allowing references such as Matthew 14:13a.

 

Finally, it may be useful to reach out to Joe Weaks to see how he did his analysis, perhaps he used a different method from what we are referring to.

 

Finally finally, it may be of use (not sure, though) to check out a near utility one of our users made, RegexForAccordance: http://www.accordancebible.com/forums/topic/14771-regexforaccordance/

 

Since it supports Unicode, it may give you access to searching capabilities for your imported Unicode user bible until we enable the functionality directly within the app.

 

I hope this helps, and others may chime in with other advice.