Princeton-CDH/startwords: Issue 2

Issue 2: Scribes

Between the ninth and nineteenth centuries, community members in Fustat, Egypt discarded textual materials in a storeroom (or 'geniza') of the Ben Ezra synagogue. Today, this corpus of 350,000 fragments, which ranges from liturgical text to personal records, is known as the Cairo Geniza and fuels a global digital scholarship endeavor.

Launched in 2017, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza is a multilingual crowdsourcing project intent on classifying and transcribing this corpus. An international partnership led by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and the Zooniverse—the world's largest platform for online crowdsourced research—the project invites the public to view and decipher Cairo Geniza fragments. In doing so, the participants (#GenizaScribes) become scribes themselves. The volunteers become part of the history of this collection, converting handwritten sentences into machine-readable text and contributing their questions and insights to the project.

Features

• Data's Destinations: Three Case Studies in Crowdsourced Transcription Data Management and Dissemination
• "Strangers in the Landscape": On Research Development and Making Things for Making

Snippets

• Serendipity in the Cairo Geniza
• Creating and Recreating Virtual Community on Douglass Day

For a list of new features, see the CHANGELOG.md file.