The First Six Months...

Over the past six months, we have worked on a variety of tasks covering different aspects of the project. The work began with an examination of the technical foundations of our communication and the data structure for day-to-day work with a national team.

We worked intensively on platform development in order to create the necessary infrastructure to support the further course of the project and to present our results.

The technical development of the backend included the implementation of the basic functions, e.g. the development of rights management to enable differentiated access rights for different user groups and to ensure the secure handling of data. At the same time, we worked on finding and acquiring relevant texts that are important for the project. We also began developing the search function, which will enable users to access the content efficiently and find specific information.

In the area of the front end, the focus was on design and technical development. An important milestone was the logo development (Jörg Fritsche), which strengthens the visual identity of the project. Another step forward was the integration of an API between the platform and this website, which allows us to display news on both pages.

In addition, the translation of the info texts and buttons was started to ensure user-friendliness in the different language versions. The development of the comment page functions is also a central part of the front-end work. Finally, a decision was made on the fonts to ensure a consistent and aesthetically pleasing presentation of the text in all fonts and languages.

A central component of our work in the first few months was the topic of “template development and dealing with old files”. This required a careful analysis of existing data and templates in order to develop consistent and functional templates that meet current requirements. At the same time, we worked on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and digitization in order to be able to process old editions in different languages.

The creation of this website was an important milestone in informing both internal and external project members and interested persons about the progress and objectives of the project.

At the same time, we have dealt with theoretical considerations on methodology in order to further develop the project in a methodologically substantiated way.

Working in small teams has made it possible to advance the work on content. There are currently small teams for the Gospel of Mark, the Epistle of James, 1 Corinthians, Galatians and the Pastoral Epistles.

In order to prepare for the publication, we have been working on the typesetting so that the end products can be produced in print-ready form with as little effort as possible from the data for the platform.

At the same time, networking and communication were central components of our work, both within the team and with external partners, in order to promote the exchange of information on, for example, technologies and further developments in the field of early Judaism and New Testament studies.

Finally, we organized various events such as internal training courses, the kick-off meeting and the symposium in September.