The Digital Edition of the Masorah in MS Vat. ebr. 14 as a Challenge for the Digital Humanities

The evolution of digital methods and workflows in the humanities offers new possibilities for the analysis of historical text sources, going beyond the limitations of traditional printed scholarly editions. In terms of research on medieval Masoretic bibles, not only the emergence of digital archives, offering high quality manuscript sources, but also the broadening sense of complexity in form, content and context of the Masorah enables Jewish Studies scholars to develop suitable data models and technologies to edit and analyze huge masoretic text corpora. While there are several common standards existing to manage editions of many different types, the edition of complex masoretic material, especially dealing with figurative elements, seem to be challenging, confronting the editor with drawings to be read as images and text simultaneously, but not mandatory structured in linear sequences. In this talk, we will discuss how to set up digital data models to deal with masoretic text corpora and to develop the basics for an annotated digital scholarly edition of masoretic bible codices, shown by example of MS Vat. ebr. 14.