Progress, real but in small steps

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.

Hayim Lapin is Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Digital Mishnah on March 11, 2012.