A Digital Synopsis of Mishnah and Tosefta

FAIN: HG-229342-15

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Hayim Lapin (Project Director: September 2014 to November 2019)

Development of a web-based resource that would integrate digital editions of two canonical Jewish texts, the Mishnah and the Tosefta, alongside tools for intertextual comparison and analysis. Freie Universität, Berlin, is requesting 115,383.60€ from DFG.

The proposed project is a digital synoptic alignment of the Mishnah and the Tosefta. The Mishnah is the foundational text of rabbinic Judaism from about 200 AD/CE. The Tosefta (the "supplement") maps closely onto the Mishnah, but its constituent material has a complex relationship with the parallel material in the Mishnah. Our proposed synopsis provides digital alignments of medieval witnesses to the separate texts, and aligns the two texts with each other. The Project implements XML-based technologies for transcribing, querying, and presenting textual data and algorithmic procedures for comparing runs of texts. In particular, it contributes to the developing area of text reuse. It makes it possible to statistically measure the stemmatic evolution of texts, as independent texts and in relation to other texts.