Some months ago I wrote about my work with Michael Sperling analyzing and graphing the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud (see here). Our full academic paper on this remains forthcoming (although all of our data and code is now public – for more information see here), but in the interim I wrote a more accessible essay that discusses our work for Tablet Magazine. That piece can be found here.
academic
Josephus’s Knowledge of Scripture
In my book, How the Bible Became Holy, I suggested that both Josephus and Paul should be seen in a similar light: Jews from Jerusalem who, like many in their class, were brought up with little knowledge of Hebrew or Scripture, and whose first real exposure to written Scripture was in Greek translation in the Diaspora. I have published a few preliminary studies on this, and not that long ago published the scholarly version for the argument about Paul. Now the scholarly article on Josephus, “Josephus’s Knowledge of Scripture,” has just appeared in the Journal of Ancient Judaism. The article can be accessed here, but requires either a fee or institutional access to Brill. Here, though, is the Abstract:
Scholars have long debated whether Josephus learned Scripture while he was in Jerusalem or only once he got to Rome. The question intersects with, and is hard to answer without, a more general assessment of language use and the education of the (priestly) elite in Jerusalem at that time. This paper argues that Josephus knew little Hebrew and never learned to read Scripture in the original; he was, in this respect, typical of the Jewish elite. His introduction to written Scripture was in its Greek translation, in Rome.
Jewish Studies by the Numbers
With Alex Berry, I have launched a new web project that analyzes journals in Jewish studies. You can view the site here, where you can see many different ways of visualizing and interacting with the data. What does it all mean? You tell us!
Expected Job Opening: Project Manager for “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine”
Please note – and this is important – that the following position announcement is tentative and pending both funding and final institutional approval. If you are interested in the position, please contact Professor Michael Satlow at satlow.sabbatical@gmail.com.
IIP Project Manager Job Description
The “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine” project (www.brown.edu/iip) is devoted to collecting and assuring open access to the inscriptions (texts written on durable materials) from the region of Israel/Palestine that date to around the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE. The inscriptions are an invaluable resource for historians, but for non-academics also offer a fascinating window into the past. We are supported by the Brown University Library.
We are now seeking seeking a part-time project manager. The position involves running the day-to-day operations of the website. It reports directly to the principal investigator and works closely with the technical director.
Your primary job duties would include:
- Help hiring, training, and supervising student workers who encode inscriptions;
- Encode inscriptions and proofread encoded inscriptions;
- Correct and clean encoded data;
- Research inscriptions to encode;
- Solicit, coordinate, and edit short, accessible essays on the inscriptions;
- Help to add linguistic and content tags to inscription data;
- Keep the documentation updated;
- Help to shape the direction of the project.
The ideal candidate:
- Has or is working towards a PhD in a relevant field, and has working knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew (modern and ancient), and Aramaic, along with one or two European languages (French or German preferred);
- Is, or can be, comfortable, working with encoding inscriptions in XML using an EpiDoc conformant schema;
- Is comfortable working with common digital platforms, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Sheets, and Trello;
- Is self-motivated and can dependably invest about 15 hours per week in the project most weeks of the year and is available for meetings once every week or two;
- Has experience supervising and motivating undergraduate students;
- Can generate and present at conferences independent research based on the project;
- Is enthusiastic about the mission of the project and can generate and help implement new ideas to improve it.
The job can be done remotely, although the candidate must be available to work with the team based in Providence, RI. The start date is September 1, 2020. Pay would be by the hour and there are no benefits. There is a chance that this job could be renewed for a total of three years.
Digital Humanities: Some Updates
Over the last few years, attempting to ease myself into the field of “digital humanities,” I have attended a few related conferences. The largest was DH2019 in Utrecht, which I frankly found inspiring. The conference kicked off for me a year that I heavily devoted to learning DH related skills, such as network graphing and Python programming. With collaborators, I submitted two proposals to present at DH2020, which was to be in Ottawa this year. Both were accepted. And then, of course, the conference was shut down.
I opted not to “present” digitally in the virtual version of the conference (the format was a bit unusual and intriguing, but I just couldn’t find the energy to participate). The abstracts of the two papers, however, were accepted and are now available.
The first is on my ongoing project, “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine“. While we have produced several papers already about various aspects of this project, this presentation, with Elli Mylonas, was to focus on the way use Linked Open Data (LOD). The abstract can be found here, although as of now the second image appears not to be displaying properly.
The second project, with Michael Sperling, is called “The Rabbinic Network.” We have developed a visualization and quantitative analysis of the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud. We hope to soon have further news about publications relating to this project and a website and Github site devoted to it. For now, the abstract can be seen here.