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Thursday, May 21, 2020

Scripta Qumranica Electronica

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: German-Israeli project to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls alive on the screen. An advantage offered by a digital edition is that readers can test the editorial decisions by directly interacting with the primary data (Rossella Tercatin, Jerusalem Post).

Project manager Bronson Brown-deVost:
“First, an editor usually organizes the material for the edition. This may include materials previously organized by other colleagues,” he highlighted. “Secondly, the editor will decide how to instruct the edition and what accompanying notes and commentary should be included in it. Due to the limitations of print, the editor must usually place boundaries on how much ancillary information is in the volume and how much is limited by the print media itself, for instance life-size mockups of the scrolls is difficult to share as are large numbers of high-resolution images. Such restrictions do not apply to digital editions.”
With current restrictions on travel, which will last who knows how long, projects like this one which facilitate remote research are all the more important.

Cross-file under Digitization. For earlier posts on the project, see here and links.

And for many other manuscript digitization projects, see here and links and here, here, here, here, and here.

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