Toward a Digital Text Service for Biblical, Qumran, and Rabbinic Literature

Texts in the digital age open new possibilities for scholars and readers. In Classics, recent years have seen the birth of the Canonical Text Service (CTS) architecture. For many literary texts, one can now refer to a whole composition or any part thereof up to the word or variant reading in an edition of the author’s choice via a unique and universal identifier called a URN (uniform resource name). The URN is human-readable, which means it can be used as a form of citation. More importantly, the CTS uses the URN to deliver the requested text or information about the text electronically. Websites, applications, and research projects can rely on the CTS to provide text dynamically and link them with other such resources. A digital publication might display the text in its original text or its translation automatically when a reader hovers with her mouse over such a reference. Furthermore, URNs can be used as the basis of links with other stable data in published, machine readable formats (e.g., RDF, resource description framework). This allows researchers to combine references, to qualify their relationship and to construct meta-databases. Since the links themselves can be represented using open standards, the linkages can themselves be easily be used in later editions or studies. We will exemplify some direct and derivative uses with a digital edition of the Mishnah and discuss possibilities and pitfalls with regard to Bibles, Qumran literature and larger Rabbinics.