The Problem:
In Patristics, and likely historical materials more broadly, Letters are embedded in the texts. For example, Athanasius of Alexandria. “Defence against the Arians.” In St. Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace,contains more than 20 letters - none of which are tagged as letters. Unfortunately, it is not reasonable to expect the Faithlife production team to read the resources to find them.
On the other hand, it would be very helpful to have them tagged and searchable as they are significant contributions to our knowledge of the author for some of the minor authors.
The Proposal:
Logos can help academics and scholars by using them to create high quality tagging. How?
- Logos creates a highlighting palette that has the definition of the Letter label that uses a fixed Notebook.
- When a professor is working on a text or author, teaching a text or author . . . it can be very useful to them if they and their collaborators or student have the text tagged. They could simply share the Notebook but it would be easier for them it they could simply make the labels official.
- The professor/scholar notifies Logos that a group of labels is available. Logos converts the labels to standard labels and removes them from the Notebook. If there is a practical way to do it, Logos also propagates the labels across other editions of the text.
- Ideally this could be designed in a manner that allowed for the addition of missing attributes on existing labels.
The scholars now have the texts important to them indexed more fully and all users benefit. The cost to Faithlife is minimal.
The Difficulty:
Unfortunately, that simple, rosy scenario hides one significant thorn. For labels to be useful, they require consistency. That means that for Author and Recipient there must be a quick way to add names to the selection list of acceptable values rather than trusting that users will have the same idea of what constitutes the "plain text of their normalized name".
Longer term:
If this proposal works, I would like to see it expanded initially to include:
- a new label for Creeds again concerned primarily with those embedded in Patristic writings.
- the ability to add and edit sermon labels
Obviously, the labels to be added should be driven by the needs of the academics and scholars.
