Hayim Lapin
How does one create a digital edition of a classical text, and what do we learn from it?
The Mishnah is in many ways a foundational text for contemporary Jews, and continues to be part of the curriculum of formal and informal study. A legal compendium of about 200 AD/CE , the Mishnah is also significant for understanding late-second-century Jews in Palestine. Yet no critical edition of the text exists. The Digital Mishnah Project aims to produce a born-digital edition that will take into account the full array of manuscript and other evidence, and automate the process of comparing variant readings and assessing the relationships between manuscripts.
Conceived as a tool rather than an edition, the Project will certainly make it easier for those who wish to track the text back to its earliest form to do so. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that its contribution to medieval book culture. As a tool, its design should draw on but also further develop the resources for other such editions, in any language.
The presentation will feature a demo, followed by a discussion of some of preliminary observations.
Hayim Lapin is the Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD from Columbia University. Hayim’s research has been at the intersection of classical Jewish texts (especially legal texts) and social and cultural history. His most recent book is on the development of the rabbinic movement in Palestine in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era (AD) seen from the perspective of Roman provincial history. His current project, drawing on the same body of literature, is a digital scholarly edition of a principal legal text known as the Mishnah.
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