Jewish Studies – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

The Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies and MITH present: Digitizing the Cairo Genizah Collections, on April 29

MITH — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 10:41:32 +0000

The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland present:

Digitizing the Cairo Genizah Collections
Dr. Roni Shweka
Harry Starr Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University

Wednesday, April 29, 2015
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
MITH Conference Room
0301 Hornbake Library North

The Cairo Genizah is a unique treasure trove of medieval Jewish manuscripts, comprising about 250,000 fragments written mainly in the 10th to the 13th centuries. During the last years this collection, currently spread-out in about 60 libraries in Europe, North America and Israel, has been digitized by the Friedberg Genizah Project almost in full, producing some 450,000 digital images. The lecture will introduce this collection and will present some of the modules and tools that have been developed for automatically extracting data from the digital images, joining the dispersed fragments, and locating fragments by a specific handwriting.

Dr. Roni Shweka (PhD, Rabbinic Literature, Hebrew University, 2009) is currently a Harry Starr Fellow in the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His main fields are Jewish law in the Geonic period (8th-11th centuries) and the research of the Cairo Genizah. He is an Academic Advisor in Genazim: The Friedberg Genizah Project Computerization Unit.

For more information, visit the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies website, or email Debra Kirsch.

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Paul Jaskot Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 12:00:59 +0000

Please note that this Digital Dialogue is a special co-sponsored talk in conjunction the Art History & Archaeology Department, and occurs on a different weekday and location.

The Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture is located in Room 4213 of the Art and Sociology Building.

The Central Building Office at Auschwitz was for its time one of the largest architectural offices in Europe with over 150 SS architects and engineers employed as well as an equal number of forced-labor draftsmen. It was these architects who literally built the infrastructure of imperialist expansion in the East, as well was the brutal complementary structures of the Jewish genocide.

This talk analyzes the documentary evidence of the imperial ambitions of the SS as well as the digital visualizations of that archival evidence. Building off of his current work on digitally mapping the site (with his co-author, Anne Kelly Knowles), Jaskot asks what is at stake for digital mapping in the humanities, as well as for a spatial and architectural understanding of the Holocaust.

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Hayim Lapin: “A Digital Edition of A Classical Hebrew Text: The Digital Mishnah Project

Digital Dialogues — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:00:53 +0000

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.

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