Princeton Geniza Lab

The main focus of this project is uncovering the secrets of Geniza's, which are the repositories located in Jewish synagogues or cemeteries for the damaged books or papers that relate to burial practices.
The three goals that this lab hopes to achieve are listed as follows on the website: "The first is English translations. We consider translation to be an integral part of the research process and of understanding how scholars are reading their documents; and only when the digitized documents are available in translation will they reach the wider public. We cannot provide translations of all the texts currently on the site. But we are actively finding ways to link existing translations, and requiring that any new transcriptions uploaded to the site be accompanied by translations to English.

Our second new goal is the development of a technological infrastructure that will link images, transcriptions, translations and a paper-trail of previous research materials, especially unpublished ones, on the reasoning that access to the interim products of research should not be restricted. Those research materials include Goitein’s vast archive of index cards describing thousands of Geniza documents.

The third new goal constitutes a return to Goitein’s original vision but in slightly altered and, we hope, more immediately practicable form: mapping the entire documentary Geniza corpus through descriptions of the manuscripts’ contents. By unlinking the process of describing the contents of the documents from the laborious process of transcription and translation, we hope to extend the corpus as rapidly as possible. Transcriptions can then be undertaken in clusters by document type, on the reasoning that it is is often easier to transcribe dozens of documents belonging to the same genre than to transcribe five or six of different types."

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Title

Princeton Geniza Lab

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Date

2021-03-04

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Abstract

The main focus of this project is uncovering the secrets of Geniza's, which are the repositories located in Jewish synagogues or cemeteries for the damaged books or papers that relate to burial practices.
The three goals that this lab hopes to achieve are listed as follows on the website: "The first is English translations. We consider translation to be an integral part of the research process and of understanding how scholars are reading their documents; and only when the digitized documents are available in translation will they reach the wider public. We cannot provide translations of all the texts currently on the site. But we are actively finding ways to link existing translations, and requiring that any new transcriptions uploaded to the site be accompanied by translations to English.

Our second new goal is the development of a technological infrastructure that will link images, transcriptions, translations and a paper-trail of previous research materials, especially unpublished ones, on the reasoning that access to the interim products of research should not be restricted. Those research materials include Goitein’s vast archive of index cards describing thousands of Geniza documents.

The third new goal constitutes a return to Goitein’s original vision but in slightly altered and, we hope, more immediately practicable form: mapping the entire documentary Geniza corpus through descriptions of the manuscripts’ contents. By unlinking the process of describing the contents of the documents from the laborious process of transcription and translation, we hope to extend the corpus as rapidly as possible. Transcriptions can then be undertaken in clusters by document type, on the reasoning that it is is often easier to transcribe dozens of documents belonging to the same genre than to transcribe five or six of different types."

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