11/7/2012

Project Description

This project is an effort to transcribe the full text of the 1846 edition of the Surinam-Creole New Testament.

The project has two phases:

Phase 1: Transcribe the accompanying PDF file of Da Njoe Testament vo wi Masra en Helpiman Jesus Kristus into a plain-text, machine-readable copy of the full text.

Phase 2: Once the full text has been transcribed, the document will be marked up in XML using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup standard.

The project will begin with a small number of transcribers, and then opened up for crowd sourcing once a significant amount of transcribed texts have been accumulated as examples.

Transcription Instructions

1. All transcriptions will be done with a plain-text editor and saved as .txt files
2. Each page of the source text (PDF) will be the basis of an individual transcription file.
3. Each page will be named according to the following pattern: pg001.txt, pg002.txt, pg003.txt... pg090.txt, pg091.txt, pg092txt..., etc.
4. Pages may be transcribed in any order, as long as the individual text files are named properly and according to the naming convention set above.
5. Comments may be included in the transcriptions as long as they are surrounded by commenting code like so: /* Add your comments here */
6. Words at the end of a line are split and hyphenated because of the end of a line will be transcribed without the hyphen. Words that contain a hyphen but are not at the end of a line will remain hyphenated.
7. If transcribing pages that do not yet have a directory, create the new directory using the naming convention used for currently created directories, such as for the directory "02_st_matteus". Since the book of Matthew is directory "02", make sure that the other books are ordered in the same sequence following "02".