Jon Stokes heralds Google's digitalization of the Dead Sea Scrolls:
[I]t’s rare that scholars get to compare a a high-quality, full-color facsimile of a source text to the edited critical edition that forms the basis of their work. But what’s even rarer is the opportunity to compare a high-quality image of a source text to the transliteration and/or transcription that underlies the critical edition. (A transliteration is where a scholar tries to copy the source text exactly, misspellings and all; a transcription is a cleaned up version of the transliteration, where spelling, punctuation, diacriticals, and the like are all normalized.) Transcriptions and transliterations are almost never released; all scholars see is the resulting, cleaned-up edition.
During my ten years of grad school, I had occasion to compare a number of scholarly transcriptions (and a few transliterations) to images of sources, and I, my classmates, and my professors were routinely shocked at the parts of their work that scholars failed to flag as questionable. There would be words and passages that clearly should’ve been marked in the transcription with a dot under them, to signify that the text was pretty much illegible and the scholar was just guessing, but they weren’t.
Zenpundit applauds the news, and notes that the Nag Hammadi Archive can be explored via the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.
The Dish 