File System Archaeology for MorphGNT


Some of you will be aware of Ulrik Petersen's work on augmenting Tischendorf's 8th edition with morphological tags and lemmata, based on work by Clint Yale and Maurice Robinson. Ulrik is also the developer of Emdros, an open-source text database engine for annotated text.

The overlap of Ulrik's interests and work with my own on MorphGNT is very exciting and so we've started talking about how we might be able to collaborate on some things together.

To help facilitate this, I've spent much of this long weekend so far going through the last 12 years of work on MorphGNT and putting things into Subversion. Because my work on MorphGNT has always been in fits and spurts and has spanned approximately five different desktop machines over the 12 years, it's required a fair bit of "file system archaeology".

The archaeology analogy seems apt because, I'm essentially piecing together a history based on what "layer" I'm finding the files in - e.g. a file on a backup of my website in 2002 probably dates later than those found in the tar balls from when I moved from one machine to another in 1997.

There's also an analogy with textual criticism as in some cases I have to look at two files and judge whether a change from A to B or B to A is more likely.

It's been a lot of fun, especially uncovering little scripts I wrote back in the nineties to do various analyses.

The original post was in the category: morphgnt but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.

The original post had 1 comment I'm in the process of migrating over.