Methodology

III. Methodology

To achieve these objectives, the project will proceed in the following way:

1. Collecting digital copies of all known Arabic Gospels texts. To achieve this task, we are in the process of consolidating accounts from manuscript catalogues that are held in different countries. We use the monumental work of Graf on Arabic Christian Literature as our basis and update it with new findings from catalogues, manuscripts examination and complementary literature published since the work of Graf. Thus far we have completed a detailed list of Arabic Gospels manuscripts conserved in Lebanon, Syria and Germany[1].
2. Building a digital corpus for the Gospels in Arabic containing the transcriptions of the identified texts.
3. Defining types and techniques of analysis that will be performed on the content of the corpus.
4. Designing, developing and implementing appropriate tools for textual analysis.
5. Conceiving a formal evaluation grid that may be used to define the identity of a text and to build a taxonomy of the Arabic translations.