ERC Synergy MiDRASH Awarded to EPHE and partner institutions
MiDRASH – Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script
The European Research Council has awarded an ERC Synergy Grant to the EPHE and its partner institutions in Israel for a six years computational-humanities project on Medieval Hebrew manuscripts starting in 2023 with a budget of over 10 million Euro. eScriptorium and kraken play a central role in it.
The National Library of Israel has already digitized some 100,000 manuscripts in Hebrew (as well as Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, and other Jewish languages) located in libraries around the globe as part of its Ktiv project. However, making their contents accessible to researchers and laypersons for detailed study remains a monumental challenge.
In this project, we aim to achieve the following goals:
• Convert the writing appearing in the images of a large fraction of those manuscripts into searchable text — including as much as possible of interlinear insertions and marginal comments. This will require significant improvements in the state-of-the-art of computerized page segmentation and handwritten-text recognition.
• Have the computer compare the multitude of texts to find quotations, paraphrases, borrowings, allusions, and other intertextual relations. These can be made available to people browsing or studying the texts.
• Train computer algorithms to analyze handwriting so as to determine where and when each manuscript was written — down to the century and the country. This will involve synergetic feedback between human paleographers and modern neural-network machine learning, teaching the computer to detect the features that have been identified by experts throughout the manuscripts, identifying outliers, and explaining machine classifications in human-understandable terms.
• Train computer algorithms to analyze the texts for linguistic (lexical, morphological, and syntactic) features that can be used in text searches and which can help place literary works in their historical context.
• With the above resources in hand, several case studies will be undertaken to map out the migration and evolution of texts and ideas within medieval Jewish communities.
The results of this project — data as well as algorithms — will be made available to the public.
PI Nachum Dershowitz, Tel-Aviv University
PI Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, EPHE-PSL
PI Avi Shmidman, Bar Ilan University
cPI Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, EPHE-PSL
with the partner institutions National Library of Israel and Haifa University.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra (February 3, 2023). ERC Synergy MiDRASH Awarded to EPHE and partner institutions. eScripta. Retrieved October 12, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/oieq
4 Responses
[…] The project undertaken in very close interaction with teams led by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (EPHE, PSL), Nachum Dershowitz (Tel Aviv-University), Avi Shmidman (Bar Ilan University), as well as the National Library of Israel and Haifa University. With a total budget of over 10 million euros, this is the largest publicly funded project in Jewish Studies. It aims to revolutionize our understanding of the literary process, text and manuscript production in Ancient and Medieval Judaism by striving to automatically transcribe ca. 30.000 manuscripts in Hebrew characters until the 16th century, annotate them linguistically, calculate the intertextuality graph and perform a series of case-studies as well as improving or developing the algorithms necessary for that. For a brief presentation of the project please check https://escripta.hypotheses.org/500 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqAWSw-vtn0 […]
[…] MiDRASH is composed of four teams led respectively by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (EPHE, PSL), Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (EPHE, PSL/Oxford), Nachum Dershowitz (Tel Aviv-University), Avi Shmidman (Bar Ilan University), in collaboration with the National Library of Israel and Haifa University. Its overall aim is to advance our understanding of the literary, textual and manuscript production processes in Ancient and Medieval Judaism by applying computational methods in order to transcribe and analyse thousands of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. For a brief presentation of the project please check https://escripta.hypotheses.org/500 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqAWSw-vtn0 […]
[…] thousands of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. For a brief presentation of the project please check MiDRASH and […]
[…] Founded in 1868, EPHE, PSL is a leading French institute of advanced studies. Its Humanities’ sections include ancient and medieval Jewish Studies and Hebrew palaeography and codicology. ERC-Synergy programme MiDRASH is composed of four teams led respectively by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (EPHE, PSL), Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (EPHE, PSL/Oxford), Nachum Dershowitz (Tel Aviv-University), Avi Shmidman (Bar Ilan University), in collaboration with the National Library of Israel and Haifa University. Its overall aim is to advance our understanding of the literary, textual and manuscript production processes in Ancient and Medieval Judaism by applying computational methods to transcribe and analyse thousands of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. For a brief presentation of the project please check https://escripta.hypotheses.org/500 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqAWSw-vtn0 […]