If we're to start a club project, what would you want to build ??
Well, since you’re Catholic and I’m Orthodox, and a lot of members of the site are liturgical Christians, or are Christians who attend churches that use a lectionary such as the Revised Common Lectionary, I think a generic framework for managing the variable portions of worship services, ranging from appointed scripture lessons to the more sophisticated and elaborate propers of the Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran liturgies (and also those of some Anglican churches and Ordinariate chruches which in addition to the Collect and the appointed scripture lessons, also use additional liturgical resources, some of which work with the Book of Common Prayer or the Book of Divine Worship, such as the 19th century classics Ritual Notes or the Directorum Anglicanorum, and some of which are used with the Anglican Missal, which is basically an English translation of the old Latin missal with some minor variations.
The key word here is generic - a basic building block type system which could be used by existing projects such as DivinumOfficium.com, CopticReader, the Liturgical Resources Department of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, which currently has a primtive app that only displays PDFs, and the Ponomar Project which has done some automation (of these, divinumofficium.com probably has the most impressive tech, although lately they’ve also had a number of bugs, for example, the system failing to display the text of a mass on an arbitrary date in any format other than the basic low mass (so no text for a solemn mass for dates other than the present, for instance).
A basic text processing system built around managing variable text portions of a worship service, which could be changed in systems using the library either automatically based on the calendar date, or manually based on the preferences of the congregation or celebrant, since for example, the ordinary form of the Roman Missal provides four Eucharistic Prayers (plus a few additional ones for special purposes if I recall) and has several other variable portions, and the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is the same (indeed, the 1979 BCP even followed the same sequence as the the Roman Missal in terms of the Eucharistic prayers, so the first one is the traditional Anglican Holy Communion service, the second one is, like the Roman Missal, based on the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, the third one is a variant of the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, and the fourth one is Eucharistic Prayer no. 4 from the Roman Missal, which was intended for ecumenical celebrations of the liturgy); among more ancient liturgies, Coptic Orthodox liturgy allows for three Anaphoras (Eucharistic Prayers) to be used at the discretion of the celebrant and a large number of Fraction Prayers which are said while the priest breaks the bread, the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church likewise provides a choice of around 14 Anaphoras, including one which is a complete, unabbreviated version of the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus (documented in the third century by St. Hippolytus of Rome, but we know it was the ancient liturgy of Antioch, which later underwent revisions in wording, and the revised version is still used by the Syriac Orthodox and Maronite Catholics, but is also the basis for the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, however, since the Ethiopians use the unrevised version and have done so since the fourth century, it is probably the oldest liturgical text in use in the world in substantially its original form); speaking of which the Syriac Orthodox Divine Liturgy has 86 Anaphoras of which decent English translations exist of around 16 of them.
Conversely, most Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Rite Catholic (such as the Ukrainian Catholics, Ruthenian Greek Catholics, Melkite Catholics, Italo-Albanian Greek Catholics, the actual Greek Catholics of Greece, among many others) churches only use two Divine Liturgies, plus the Presanctified Liturgy, and when they use them is based on a highly prescriptive liturgical calendar which specifies absolutely everything such as the hymns to be sung at each service, what to do when two feasts such as a movable feast connected to the date of Easter and a fixed feast coincide, for example, if the Annunciation falls on the same day as Palm Sunday or even Pascha (Easter Sunday) - the latter event resulting in a particularly beautiful celebratory liturgy). There are other Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic anaphoras, such as the Divine Liturgy of St. James, which several Eastern Orthodox churches will celebrate this Thursday, the feast of St. James on the Revised Julian and Gregorian calendars, and the much less commonly used Divine Liturgy of St. Mark, a version of the ancient liturgy of Alexandria (which the Copts also celebrate) and the Divine Liturgy of St. Peter, which uses the Roman Canon, or Eucharistic Prayer 1 as its called in the Novus Ordo Missae.
Now all this complexity need not concern us, since what I propose is not an implementation but rather a toolkit designed to simplify the process of writing automated systems to handle all of the above. Indeed I have a complete set of specifications for this and was working on one before I fell ill; I’m a member of a group called LiturgyWorks which consists of various scholars, clergy and others interested in liturgies, and who have produced a number of texts which will be released into the public domain or in some cases under an open source license such as a creative commons license, but we made the decision to delay releasing them until we had an open source system which could allow for them to be used dynamically. I’ve been working on implementing that with AI, but got sidetracked with research into improving the AI system itself, for example, with biomimetic reproduction like I described above.
The difficulty level for the project is low, since its basically just a content management system adapted for handling liturgical texts, and using AI, we can make the development of it even easier by automating some of the more boring bits of code. What makes it interesting however would be in getting it to work ideally based on using an AI to generate the automation instructions from existing liturgical text books, by reading the rubrics, which would involve interfacing with an AI system (by making API calls to openAI or another provider, or alternately using an open source AI, which I would prefer - and interestingly, chatGPT will let you use it to develop training data for an open source special purpose AI such as one optimized to read rubrics and generate the appropriate text. Doing this using AI makes sense to me, because LLMs are the ultimate pattern-matching software; it’s like having a version of grep, sed, awk, m5, and all the other classic UNIX text processing tools, or equivalent tools some GNU, Linux and other developers use with GNU Emacs, but that one can converse with, in the English language or any number of other languages, even extinct languages such as Akkadian or Sumerian.
By the way my openAi Business account allows me to add people to my team which I would do for any serious contributor to this project, which would provide access to openAI’s Codex system for software development as well as the possibility of working on some of the advanced AI projects I have in mind. I’m presently already planning on adding a third seat to my account, since for various reasons I wound up using both of the two seats my business account requires as a minimum, and a third seat would allow me to let people who I’ve promised to allow see my AIs, such as my friend
@Xeno.of.athens , access, and it could also be used periodically by people involved in this liturgical toolkit project.
