The Electronic Scriptorium: Markup for New Testament Manuscripts

The creation of scholarly editions has been transformed by the adoption of digital tools, affecting every stage of the process from approaching primary sources to final publication. One of the most significant is the way in which electronic media overcome some of the constraints of printed texts and permit a fuller and more flexible presentation of the data, as well as facilitating subsequent alteration and future re-use. This is exemplified by the full-text manuscript transcriptions produced by the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP) and the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in their work towards the first scientific edition of the New Testament, the Editio Critica Maior. The present study offers an overview of the process of transcribing biblical manuscripts and outlines the encoding in Extensible Markup Language (XML) developed as part of the Workspace for Collaborative Editing, a joint Anglo-German project to create a suite of digital tools for the pro-duction of the Editio Critica Maior and, in time, for other textual traditions.