Contributing Transcriptions to the SCTA
By Jeffrey C. Witt
If you want to transcribe a text that can be aggregated by the SCTA, you need to follow some basic rules.
1. First you need to fork the corresponding SCTA Text Directory
A list of SCTA text directories can be found at http://github.com/scta-texts
If you’re not familiar with GIT, you can use the TEI-WEB-EDITOR https://tei-web-editor.herokuapp.com/ to simplify things. Log in with your github credentials. Click the Open icon, and add the url of the repo you want to fork in the filed titled, “Fork another repository”.
2. Second, you need to understand the structure of an SCTA directory.
Each sub-directory in a text repo corresponds to a resource in the SCTA database.
The resource can be dereferenced at http://scta.info/resource/
Each sub-directory / resource refers to a smaller section of the larger text.
Find the section of the text your interested in and open that sub-directory.
3. Third, create a properly named file.
Each resource can have several transcriptions: diplomatic transcriptions of different witnesses, translations transcriptions, and critical transcriptions.
The default canonical transcription will have the same name as the sub-directory in which it lives.
So if you’ve forked a repo, and you want to add the first transcription to a sub-folder titled “question1”, you should make a file called question1.xml.
If you want to make a diplomatic transcription of a particular witness, you can make a file with the slug of the witness as a prefix. For example, “clm26711_question1.xml”.
These are simply the default file name patterns. All of them can be over-written in a separate file called a “transcriptions.xml” file. (We’ll be adding another article about the transcriptions file later.)
4. Fourth, start transcribing follow the LombardPress-Schema Guidelines
See http://lombardpress.org/schema/docs/
In many cases, a file called template.xml will already be populated in each sub-directory. Use this file as a template to get started, but make sure to rename it properly as stated above.
5. Submit a pull request at any time.
At any time you can submit a pull request for your transcription to be approved by the SCTA community and aggregated by the SCTA crawler.
Again, if you’re using the TEI Web Editor https://tei-web-editor.herokuapp.com, you can simply hit the pull-request icon and submit your changes directly to github.
Further help
Remember the community is here to help. If you get stuck at any point, post a question to the community discussion board and someone will be sure to help. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scholastic-commentaries-and-texts-archive