What I envision is parallel transcriptions of all witnesses to the text of the Mishnah (including citations in the Talmuds and the commentaries, although I have not encoded any of these yet). These transcriptions and their markup (they will be TEI compliant) will pay greater attention to the mss. as artifacts than raw transcriptions of text, so that the data encoded could, in theory, be used by scholars interested in scribal practice or orthography. I have taken chapter 2 of Bava Metsia as my sample text, and encoded several witnesses with the help of some students. These are all viewable at http://bit.ly/uCG10o.
An example of “raw” markup (where significant data is encoded rather than marked graphically) is:

Examples of encoded texts subsequently processed to be viewed, e.g., opposite a facsimile include:

From those parallel transcriptions it should be possible to generate detailed comparisons of all witnesses or of select witnesses, without at the outset privileging any one witness. Thus, for instance, sampleparallelcolumns.html was generated through a proof of concept for how a synoptic edition might be constructed. Using the same processing method, one could select witnesses that one was interested in for some reason (all German hands, all Genizah fragments). But for some purposes a word by word collation or text with apparatus criticus is the preferred output. For this, we are provisionally working with EU-sponsored software called CollateX (still under development). One sample of output from CollateX, in the form of an alignment table, using texts of the Mishnah is at CollatexOutput.html. Although there are errors, the output is surprisingly good, especially since some of the errors have to do with “tokenization,” i.e., breaking the texts into individual units for collation, and are thus generated by me not CollateX.
What’s next?

  • Continuing to modify exiting files to match newly developing schema
  • Modify sample output through XSLT to show possibility of text and apparatus.

editor’s note: Hayim Lapin is Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Digital Mishnah on December 23, 2011.