Exploring the Corpus Masoreticum with BIMA 2.0: A New Approach Towards Digital Scholarly Editions of (but Not Limited to) Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

From its first start in 2018, BIMA 2.0 has been introduced as a prototype of a new collaborative online platform for creating digital-first manuscript editions within the project Corpus Masoreticum. Four years later, the project has processed more than 54.000 annotated line transcriptions in 40 (and growing) actively edited manuscripts, including a full edition of the masora figurata in Ms. Bl. Or. 2091 and the complete list material of Ms. Paris hébr. 148 "Okhla we-Okhla". Choosing an intuitively usable visual approach of transcribing manuscripts, especially those dealing with complex micrographical and figurative layouts, BIMA 2.0 takes advantage of retrieving digital manuscript sources by the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) protocol, provided by major international libraries and manuscript collections. Backed by cutting-edge graph database technology, an innovative "text-as-a-graph" model allows for in-depth network analysis of textual knowledge transfer across scribes, manuscripts, and genres. Following the best practices of Open Access and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, BIMA 2.0 editions can be easily queried and exported as standard TEI-XML documents, IIIF-annotations and even AltoXML documents for providing leading Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) solutions with ground truth modeling data. This paper gives an overview on the latest features and concepts of BIMA 2.0, examples from daily editorial practice, and a preview of what to expect during the next 3 years` project term.