Genre Labels from Syntactic Variation Project

This repository contains genre data as a .csv and as a Text-Fabric file. genre_ranges.csv contains ranges of verses which correspond to consecutive chunks of genre. Both the start and end of the ranges are inclusive, i.e. part of the range. verse2genre.csv contains a simple verse label to genre mapping.

The Text-Fabric file contains verse node to genre mappings for use with the BHSA corpus in Text-Fabric.

The authors of the data are Dirk Bakker, Marianne Kaajan, Martijn Naaijer, Wido van Peursen, and Janet Dyk. The data was produced in the course of the NWO-funded research project (2013-2018) on syntactic variation in the Hebrew Bible.

Martijn Naaijer has provided the original dataset in his Phd repository as an excel file: https://github.com/MartijnNaaijer/phdthesis/blob/master/Various/subgenres_synvar.xls

That spreadsheet, which is not machine readable, was manually converted into the genre_ranges.csv. The ranges are checked and matched with their appropriate BHSA verse nodes in ranges2tf.ipynb

Genre values

The following values are tagged:

prose
poetry
prophetic
instruction
list

Tagging methodology

We use three basic categories: prose, poetry and prophetic for complete books. For example, Genesis is prose, Psalms is poetry, Isaiah is prophetic, etc. The labels are not based on formal criteria, but are intended to be coarse-grained, intuitive classifications, similar to what one might find in exegetical studies.

Within prose, we added list. These are generally lists of people names. We also added instruction, which is a general tag for (mainly) law texts. Finally, we changed prose to poetry for pieces of poetry embedded in prose, such as in Genesis 49. -Martijn Naaijer