C(omputer) A(ided) T(extual) M(arkup) A(nalysis): When Textual Research meets Computational Capabilities

• In Event: Digital Humanities: On-Line Resources and Educational Exhibits

Abstract

The workshop showcases CATMA, an open-access web-tool developed at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Narratology at Hamburg University. The major strength of the system and its special appeal to scholars who based their research on textual analysis is its unique combination between close-reading and distant-reading or in other words between well-established practices among scholars of classical Judaism and new digital approaches.
In the workshop I focus on one case-study, the study of figurative language in the earliest stratum of payytanic literature. I studied the subject in my doctoral dissertation (written a decade ago) and recently I uploaded my doctoral materials and tagging of the various figurative devices into CATMA. By doing so I am able to single out the significance of the automated processing of the data and its innovative contribution to my study and at the same time to reflect about the challenges and limitations it has.
The flexibility of CATMA and the reflective nature of my presentation means that it is highly relevant to almost any scholar who work on literary and linguistic analysis and would be very helpful to scholars of rabbinic literature in particular.

Author

• Ophir Münz-Manor, The Open University of Israel