New Output
Only spammers seem to be noticing this blog, but for web-trolling software that might be interested in digital humanities and philology I thought I might add that I have updated the sample output from Collatex. collatex-table-apparatus.html shows output from user-specified witnesses in the form of (1) an alignment table based on user-specified order, (2) an extracted text of a base text (taking the first specified witness is the base text), (3) generating an apparatus. CollateX is not perfect. Some of the output problems are the result of tokenizing (the samples used were tokenized very coarsly) and can be fixed. Abbreviations
Beginning to Have Something To Show For It
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
Progress Involves Some Undoing
Thanks to the input of Travis Brown, Assistant Director at MITH and the programmer working on this project, I am now revisiting the organization of the project and its constituent files. We are now working with a central text, that will be pre-tokenized [broken into discrete and uniquely identified units by word] to which all the witnesses can link. This will result, ultimately, in undoing some of the work already done on the my manuscripts but will generate less redundancy, and more flexibility for collation and output. Thanks to the input of Trevor Munoz, Associate Director at MITH and an
Starting Out
This blog describes my progress on an born-digital critical edition of the Mishnah. For the various audiences who might read this, let me break out the terms and discuss them further. Born-digital: An edition that uses or develops technology to record, store, present, search, analyze, and study textual material, rather than a static presentation of my research. Critical edition: An edition that attempts to deal seriously with the state of a text, typically based on comparison of manuscripts. There is substantial debate about what text the edition is trying to recover (original? at some moment?), and whether this is even
Toward a Digital Edition of the Mishnah
Check back at this site for more on this project.