I’ve now updated the “Examples of Work” page 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. 8-11 (Oxf),  and TS F6.3, joining fragments from Cambridge and Oxford and:
• TS AS 85.270 (Camb), TS F6.2, and MS R2339, fol. 1 (JTS), joining fragments from Cambridge and New York

I had been holding out for my next post for a new Digital Mishnah website, courtesy of MITH, and a new collation demo hosted on it, but, that will be for my next post, deo volente.

Since my last confession, I have:

• Submitted a paper that details methods and progress to date. It’s for a Festschrift, and I’ve been asked not to state the venue openly, but can share a draft.
• Thought a lot about (and only partly understand) multivariate statistics.
• Completed the first round of markup for all the Genizah fragments for my sample chapter. A second round of markup linking the fragments to the reference text needs to be done (next bullet). Formatted versions of these texts will be viewable
• Started rethinking how to handle the encoding of highly fragmentary texts. In particular, I’ve found four pieces of a single sheet of text in two different locations in the Taylor-Schechter collection (TS AS 78.69 + TS AS 78.162 + TS AS 78.235  + TS NS 329.286; the sheet adjoins another single sheet from a third box, TS E2.71). For the present, we are encoding each fragment as a document, and recording the extent of the lacunae at the edges of the fragment as fitting within the smallest properly oriented rectangle that encloses the fragment. What needs doing is a pointing scheme that will point into the reference text.
• Identified the next fragments to work on to expand the work to Tractate Neziqin (aka the Bavot), and started to recruit people to work on it.

Next up, completing fragmentary texts; encoding the remaining Mishnah texts in the Babylonian Talmud mss., and learning some Java.