Sunday, December 04, 2005

IntraText Digital Library

There are a growing number of online digital libraries that give access to a large number of church documents, writings of the Fathers, versions of the Bible, and so on. The InterText Digital Library does this as well, but it also provides additional features which can be very useful.

For example, the complete edition of the New American Bible is available in the library. You can click on a specific word and instantly get a concordance showing other instances of this word elsewhere in the entire Bible. Footnotes are also just a click away. In these, if a reference is made to a specific passage elsewhere in the Bible, simply click on the biblical notation to read the passage. Even the words in the footnotes are in the concordance so that if you are interested in exploring a specific theme, you can do so. There is even an index of footnotes. For scholars, there are statistics and graphs for word frequency, word lists by frequency, length, or in alphabetical order.

The help section on the site provides an overview of what IntraText is and odes;
IntraText is a text converted into a "lexical hypertext", an interactive hypertext system consisting of:
  • text, which you access from the index or from the concordances. If the text contains footnotes, these will appear at the foot of the text page and the general index will also contain an index of the footnotes;
  • word lists: these are ordered alphabetically, by frequency of occurrence, in inverse order and by length. The words in the lists are linked to the concordances;
  • concordances: lists comprising every occurrence of a particular word in the text. Each occurrence is displayed in the centre of a short extract from the text;
  • statistics: word and occurrence statistics plus other features of the text.
There are thousands of documents in this library available in several languages and in dozens of fields of study. Over 1100 of these are in English. Of interest to Catholics are the following:
For other Church document see the Encheridion Vaticanum section and explore the Bibliotheca Catholica section.