JADI

Judeo-Arabic goes DIgital

About JADI

JADI: Judeo-Arabic goes DIgital project has the primary aim of researching and sharing text written in Judeo-Arabic within the scientific community. For that purpose, the project combines traditional linguistic-philological methodologies with Digital Humanities methods for processing textual/linguistic data and establishing strategies for results dissemination. 

Funded by: Sapienza University of Rome. Starting Research Proposals (type 2), 2021.

The idea behind JADI is the the development of a shared space that could host works and researches in the field of Judeo-Arabic and to foster scientific debate among scholars working on this area within – and beyond – digital contexts.

The project is lead by Dr Valentina Bella Lanza, with the support of Dr Simone Petrillo and Prof. Dr. Arianna D’Ottone Rambach. 

The Song of Songs: a Digital Edition

The pilot research developed within JADI  consists of the creation of an open-access digital edition of Jewish Theological Seminary, NY, Ms. 5491. The manuscript dates back to 15th century and its origin is Yemenite. The text is a miscellaneous including several biblical books and commentaries. The portion of the manuscript considered for this digital edition contains the Song of Songs, its Aramaic Targum and a Judeo-Arabic translation and commentary.
Our linguistic analisys addresses the Judeo-Arabic portion of the text. The first outcome of our work is the identification of the biblical references found within the Judeo-Arabic commentary.

The Manuscript Viewer is based on the EVT, an open source tool designed to create digital editions from XML-encoded texts. The encoding relies on TEI, the de facto standard for digital textual representation.

Manuscript Viewer

Viewer based on the open source visualization tool EVT

Jewish Theological Seminary, NY, Ms. 5491. Fols. 13v-53r: the Song of Songs with the Aramaic translation and the Judeo-Arabic translation and commentary. The images of the manuscript are Courtesy of The Jewish Theological Seminary, all rights reserved.

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