Housekeeping

By Hayim Lapin | Uncategorized

This Site 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

Progress, real but in small steps.

By Hayim Lapin | Uncategorized

[Originally published on March 11, 2012 at http://blog.umd.edu/digitalmishnah] 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

Thinking about the end product

By Hayim Lapin | Uncategorized

Since my last post, I have been working on a grant application. This has afforded the opportunity of some stock taking. I’ve also had some very helpful conversations with scholars in the field: Juan Garcés and Matt Munson in Hebrew Biblical Studies, Tim Finney in New Testament and Desmond Schmidt in textual computing and classics. 1. Collation. Based on very simple normalization and tokenization and a few samples, CollateX will remain error prone, unless the algorithm changes significantly. Examples: (1) In a Mishnah section with repeated words, slight differences in spelling resulted in pushing a whole clause off to the

New Output

By Hayim Lapin | Uncategorized

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

Starting Out

By Hayim Lapin | Uncategorized

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