The Site
I’ve now updated the “Examples of Work” page on digitalmishnah.org to include viewable samples. Thanks to Kirsten Keister for setting up the light box format to view the samples. The examples include two samples of work that processes more than one text (collation, synopsis) and a number of examples of manuscripts.
The Project
I’ve been working on two issues. One is pointing. I now have a complete set of pointers from the reference file (ref.xml) to the witness files for locating spans of damaged text and page and fragment beginnings and ends for fragmentary texts. Of course, because nothing is simple, the direction of all of these will have to be reversed, so that the individual witnesses point into the reference text.
In addition, I’ve improved the tokenization process, so that I can process “rich” tokens, retaining data about the word in question (e.g., that it is an abbreviation, or deleted ….; hold a regularized spelling as well as the original) as well as simple tokens, and re-join a collation based on simple tokens with the complex tokens.
Text Geek Heaven
Along the way, I’ve discovered some joining Genizah fragments. The coolest by far on a technical, jigsaw-puzzle level is the four-way join between TS AS 78.69, TS AS 78.162, TS AS 78.235 and TS NS 329.286 (Cambridge). The four fragments adjoin yet another, TS E2.71. This will be featured as a Fragment of the Month of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit. Look for it there!
Cool in that that they join material from multiple cities are:
- TS E1.99 (Camb), MS heb. c.21/6, 8-11 (Oxf), TS F6.3 and Yevr. II A 294 (Pet), joining fragments from Cambridge, Oxford, and Peterberg, and:
- TS AS 85.270 (Camb) and MS R2339, fol. 1 (JTS), joining fragments from Cambridge and New York
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 April 26th, 2012.