Resources for Student Researchers at StMU 2018
Contents
Workshop Meeting January 19, 2018
General Announcements
- Hours
- Texas Jewish Studies Triangle Undergraduate Student Conference
University of Houston, March 25-26, 2018
- Options for going forward for meetings and tasks
Mirador Viewer
- http://jubilees.stmarytx.edu/mirador
- Basic navigation: pan, zoom, slots, view, moving between pages
- Image manipulation
- Side panel: Index
- Side panel: Layers
- Side panel: Annotations
- Viewing annotation overlays
- Adding and editing annotation overlays
TEI XML of Ceriani
- HTML view:
HTML
- Eclipse Editor:
download page
February 2, 2018
Questions about TEI XML
Annotating Latin Moses with Ceriani and new readings
February 16, 2018
Preparing for research presentations
- Update on plans
- Short bios
- Dividing the presentations (see provisional abstracts below)
- Plans for being prepared
- I realize not everyone is planning to give a presentation, but I think it will be useful for all to review the big-picture of what the project is all about.
Continuing annotations in Mirador
- Questions and dilemmas since last time
- More annotations
- I plan to bring my screen over to the graduate center for excellence.
If we find it much better than the alternatives we can think about ways to share mine or eventually acquire more good monitors for digital humanities projects.
March 2, 2018
Continue annotations in Mirador
- I tracked down the issue that led to annotations disappearing in Mirador.
For the time being the “editable” annotations are limited to eleven per page.
At twelve or more they will fail to appear the next time a new browser loads the page.
There is no limit to the static annotations per page, and I can move annotations from editable to static.
- If you can read less than Ceriani still put in what Ceriani says along with what you can read.
- Other questions?
Prepare for student conferences
- I will be available for group and individual questions and review.
- Let’s plan to be ready for a practice run at the next workshop.
TEI XML
- I have not had time to check everything yet, but the checkout indicates that all of Ceriani has been or is being done.
- Gryson’s 1982 edition of the Arian Commentary on Luke poses some different challenges.
March 23, 2018
Practice of Sunday’s presentations
March 25-26, 2018
Texas Jewish Studies Triangle Student Conference
University of Houston
Provisional titles and abstracts:
The Jubilees Palimpsest Project (1): The Recovery of Lost Ancient Jewish Literature
The Jubilees Palimpsest Project (2): Digital Humanities Principles for Open Access to More Primary Primary Sources
The Jubilees Palimpsest Project at St. Mary’s University includes student researchers in its work to recover lost ancient Jewish literature.
Writings that had been unreadable under any conditions are being made available for anyone to study online using digital tools.
The first part of this two-part presentation focuses on the background of the Book of Jubilees, its preservation and near destruction in a Latin translation, and the spectral imaging technology that restores it to readability.
The Book of Jubilees was written in Hebrew in the 150s BCE.
It rewrites Genesis in such a way as to resolve interpretive problems, derive legal material, and address theological problems of its day.
Though quoted as scripture among the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was abandoned by Judaism as it survived.
As the book fell out of favor, copies were no more valuable than the parchment on which they were written, which fortunately was still pretty valuable.
The pages were erased and used to copy other texts.
The erased writing is mostly invisible to the human eye, but spectral imaging technology makes it possible to overcome the limitations of the human eye.
The second part describes the work currently underway to use digital humanities principles to provide open access to manuscripts, the most primary of primary sources.
Whether a manuscript is a palimpsest or readable upon first-hand inspection, prior to digital technology few have had direct access to ancient manuscripts.
Adherence to open standards allows the information to be interoperable across computer systems and across human scholars.
For example, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) defines standards for digital texts that reduces the ambiguity in older media.
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) defines a standard for image repositories that makes it easy to derive images into new contexts, such as paleography charts.
It also defines standards for defining the overall manuscript from the many images and annotations that describe it, such that we can navigate the pages and enhancements, see the annotations provided by others, and contribute our own.
Provisional outline:
Part 1
- Introduction to the Jubilees Palimpsest Project and student research
- What is the book of Jubilees?
- What is a palimpsest?
- How does spectral imaging make illegible manuscsripts legible?
- Overcome the limits of the human eye
- Capture
- Processing
- Texture if time
Part 2
- Scribal culture and the study of manuscripts (rather than critical editions)
- Including non-palimpsest manuscripts
- Critical editions value the earliest recoverable text and aids to the reader
- direct study of manuscripts more directly resembles the traditional experience of written literature
- Digital Humanities principles
- Human and computer languages (TEI XML)
- Interoperability (IIIF Image API and paleography charts)
- Visualization (IIIF Presentation API and Mirador viewer)
- Collaborative annotation (manuscript images tagged with transcriptions and notes, shared, could include github if time)
Existing resources
- Society of Biblical Literature 2017 transcript (LINK),
slides (LINK),
and video of voice over slides (LINK)
- UT Austin 2017 slides (LINK)
- Info session at St. Mary's, 2017 slides (LINK)
and audio recording (LINK)
- University of Rochester 2017 (LINK)
- Biblical Archaeology Review 2017 (LINK)
- Bible History Daily 2017 (LINK)
April 6, 2018
TBA