Modelling a Scholarly Digital Edition of a Classical Hebrew Text: The Case of the Mishnah

• In Event: Re-envisioning the Ancient Book

Abstract

Recent years have seen an an increase in the number of digital tools available for the production and stud of digital texts, including those in Hebrew. This paper surveys the field looking both at tools (manuscript sources, text editors, collation software, etc.) and editions, and actual editions, outlining their functionalities, and charting the availability of the data. Among the important recent developments is the recognition of the significance of interoperability of tools and data, and the consequent dependence on common standards, open source software, and generous reuse licenses.
As an example, the paper discusses the ongoing development of a digital critical edition of the Mishnah,as that project moves from the “demo” phase to that of a working edition. Some basic functions exist in the demo: (1) several views of textual witnesses based on detailed markup of the documents; (2) collation of two or more witnesses “on the fly” (including the ability to use more than one collation algorithm); (3) presentation of the collation results in one of three ways. However, a true critical edition requires additional functionalities, which may include: (1) geographic and onomastic information; (2) linguistic or morphological tagging; and (3) searchability. Arguably, too, a digital edition should provide (4) a hard-coded alignment of witnesses (based on the editors’ scholarly judgment) rather than one generated by the user on demand. The paper will discuss current work on moving these features forward, including of demonstrations of work to date and an outline of those features still in development.

author

• Hayim Lapin, University of Maryland