Corpus Masoreticum: The Inculturation of the Masora in Western European Jewish Learning Culture from the 11th to the 14th Centuries. Digital Development of a Forgotten Culture of Knowledge

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Hanna Liss
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies ; Protestant Theology ; Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392938678

This project’s aim is the first ever philological engagement with the Western European Masoretic tradition. The Ashkenazi Masoretic tradition had never been the subject of serious investigation, although it differs from the Oriental Masorah not only with respect to its philological content, but also regarding its mise-en-texte in the form of micrographic illustrations (masora figurata). In the first two funding phases, the philological work has elaborated on masora figurata in decorated Bibles as well as on linear Masorah. Considerable portions of the Masorah of 8 manuscripts have been transcribed and made available in Open Access. Ground-breaking results have been achieved following research into the philological quality of the masora figurata and its function and purpose, the Ashkenazi masoretic Bible as historical artefact, the masoretic treatise(s) Okhla we-Okhla, masora parva and magna collections, and Digital Humanities. As a born-digital project, Corpus Masoreticum is heavily backed by a highly scalable digital cloud infrastructure, covering the entire workflow for managing manuscript repositories, transcriptions, analysis and publication. Its centerpiece, the digital scholarly edition workspace BIMA 2.1 is based on three basic concepts: 1. IIIF-compatible manuscript repositories, 2. SVG TextPath transcriptions, 3. a Neo4j graph database persistence based on a loosely coupled text-as-a-graph data model. BIMA 2.1 has reached the essential objectives for the first two funding periods. The computational toolkits have been enhanced by implementing methods and algorithms like machine-learning based handwritten text recognition (HTR) and lemma feature correspondence analysis/seriation. In the third funding phase, research staff will continue transcribing masora figurata and linear masora magna, but will also continue working on textcritical issues and the characteristic features of Ashkenazi Bible text recensions. BIMA will be continued in version 2.1 after a major release update. Its development will focus on enhanced comparative tools to correlate, identify and connect textual findings within the entire digital corpus. Graph-based algorithms will be used to compute multidimensional profiles of masoretic list material to generate in-depth insights into identifiable patterns of textual knowledge transfer. Further profile results will be expected by adapting methods and tools from bioinformatics to generate comparative metrics about masoretic lists and list sequence alignment. After having introduced basic TEI XML exports for published manuscript transcriptions in late funding phase 2, the TEI export will be enhanced with critical variant apparatus entries, based on the “Link Corpus” tool. HTR data generated from Corpus Masoreticum’s own eScriptorium text recognition instance will be closely integrated into BIMA 2.1 by delivering a full-fledged two-way REST API to exchange transcription data in both directions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants