Most of the documents date to the 10th-through-13th centuries CE.Ī shopping list, including fish and saffron, in Judeo-Arabic script (Arabic written in Hebrew script), in the Libraries collection.īroadly, the fragments can be divided into two parts-the literary and the documentary, Kiron says. The Cairo Geniza is a colossal collection of scraps of paper and parchment discarded, yet preserved, in the attic storage chamber of the Ben Ezra synagogue in old Cairo over the course of a thousand years, the result of a Jewish tradition that dictates nothing be destroyed that includes God’s name. “My hope is that this project will not only serve the cause of research and discovery but it also will provide unprecedented opportunities for people to learn to read seemingly illegible texts, and to give everyone the opportunity to unlock and access this great chamber of handwritten medieval manuscript documents,” says Arthur Kiron, the Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections at Penn Libraries and a Penn adjunct assistant professor of history. The goal is that someday the transcriptions will enable readers to search the texts, opening up learning about the Geniza to a broader audience. Nearly 3,500 people from around the globe have registered on the site.Ī second phase, which launches in late June, allows people to attempt to transcribe the text in the fragments that have been classified. So far, more than 30,000 fragments have been classified, each one scrutinized at least five times, meaning that volunteers came to the site more than 180,000 times to help classify the text. The first phase, launched last August, challenged people to determine whether the script on a fragment is in Hebrew, Arabic, or both, and asked a few other sorting questions, such as whether the script was formal or informal. The Scribes of the Cairo Geniza website allows the public to view digital images of the fragments and go through steps to decipher the language of the script. The second phase, to transcribe text on the sorted fragments, begins at the end of June. Working with the research platform Zooniverse, the Libraries digital humanities team created the Scribes of the Cairo Geniza crowdsourcing site and launched the first phase last year. “The notion that you can actually get the world to help unlock the secrets of a massive dataset of fragments is incredibly exciting.” “To get documents from a thousand years ago to be scrutinized by thousands of people from all around the world for the purposes of adding to the sum of human knowledge is innovative, pioneering, and global in scope,” says Will Noel, associate university librarian and director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Penn Libraries, which holds about 650 of the fragments, is coordinating with universities and other institutions in the public crowdsourced project, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. Known as the Cairo Geniza, the 350,000 fragments of paper and parchment can be anything from the most holy religious manuscripts to the most mundane legal forms, holding endless opportunities to learn about medieval life in the Middle East. Through an innovative new website built by the Penn team in collaboration with Zooniverse, an online platform for crowdsourced research, citizen scholars can help analyze the digitized texts, which are written in five Hebrew and three Arabic scripts, some of them exceedingly rare. Harnessing the power of human cooperation, digital humanities scholars at Penn Libraries are orchestrating an epic effort to sort and transcribe handwriting on thousands of documents discarded hundreds of years ago.
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