44 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

The most technically significant OSIS distinctives, however, were three other features. The <date> element, normally limited to describing year/month/day/hour/minute/second, was augmented with types for times independent of the clock, such as sunrise and sunset, the Catholic canonical hours, and Muslim calls to prayer, and the element was also given a modified syntax enabling easy encoding of dates as repeating at intervals. This allowed lectionaries, prayer books, and other such works to be encoded with machine-readable indications of the ritual dates and times on which specific texts were to be used.

The @editions attribute allowed units of the text at virtually any size to be quickly designated for inclusion or suppression in particular generated expressions of the encoded work. For example, the books of the Apocrypha might be encoded with <div=book edition=“Catholic Study”> to include them when Catholic and Study editions of the Bible are rendered from the XML file, but not when Protestant editions are produced.

OSIS’ most enduring legacy has been its “Trojan milestone” (also known as CLIX) method for encoding elements that cross the boundaries of other elements (as when a single verse falls across two paragraphs). This was a variation on previous methods using anchors and standard milestones that “has the advantage that milestones representing a given type of element have the same name as the element, and automatically have the same attributes.”9 This method has since been incorporated by other markups, including TEI. It represented a significant innovation at the time, particularly for enabling the simultaneous mapping of different versification schemes, as found, for example, in the differences in numbering of Psalm verses between Jewish and Christian traditions.

Though the website of the Bible Technologies Group went offline in 2006 and active development of OSIS ceased, it has had a long afterlife. It remains in currency with the SWORD project and pops up from time to time in the work of individual scholars, like Robie and Bulkeley.10

Both OSIS and ThML continue to receive interest from initiatives working specifically on scriptural and theological materials.11 On the publication and software development front, too, both languages continue to be represented. Kayode Sowole, who won the University of Lagos’ “Best Student App” award for mobile development with Wazobia (an app that allows offline reading of the Bible in multiple Nigerian languages), cited both ThML and OSIS as “the most significant part of my preparation” and as having been necessary for the development of the app.12

Continuing Limitations of TEI

TEI largely became the “de facto standard for encoding DH texts” from 2002 on, following its conversion from SGML to XML.13 It is now widely regarded as “standard practice” for digital humanities projects.14 Nonethe-less, it remains true, as Plantinga originally asserted, that “[m]ultiple formats for electronic resources are a reality in today’s computing environment.” Given TEI’s ambition to provide an overarching structure capable of accommodating the widest range of needs on the part of textual scholars, it is therefore worth asking why

9 Durusau, OSIS Users Manual, 54.

10 Jonathan Robie, “Querying Greek texts in XML: Part 1,” BiblicalHumanities.org, November 13, 2015, http://biblic-alhumanities.org/xquery/tutorial/greek/2015/11/13/querying-000.html; Tim Bulkeley, “Returning to E-commen-tary,” Sansblogue, “Returning to e-commentary,” April 8, 2016, https://bigbible.org/sansblogue/bible/biblical-inter-pretation/returning-to-e-commentary/.

11 See, for example, Leonid Dubinsky, “Digital Judaica Done Right,” DigitalJudaica, http://www.digitaljudaica.org/judaica/html/index.html.

12 Dayo Adesulu, “Meet UNILAG Undergraduate who Developed Wazobia Bible Application,” Vanguard, March 27, 2014, https://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/03/meet-unilag-undergraduate-developed-wazobia-bible-application/.

13 Desmond Schmidt, “The End of XML,” Multi-Version Documents, March 18, 2018, http://multiversiondocs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-end-of-xml.html.

14 UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, “Best Practices for Digital Humanities Projects,” https://cdrh.unl.edu/articles/best_practices.