My recent piece in Tablet on my work with Michael Sperling on the rabbinic network was just picked up by an Italian website. It also contains a short interview with me about the project.
Digital Humanities
The Rabbinic Citation Network
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.
Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine: Presentation
It’s been quite a year and for many completely prosaic reasons I have not kept up this blog as I should have. This is not to say that I have not been busy (even if, at time, languishing under the conditions of the year), although not in the kinds of scholarly activities that I had an easy time sharing. I will try to be better, especially in the approaching academic year, although I doubt anyone seriously missed my posting.
This year I’ve done very few public-facing activities (I am not a fan of Zoom). But one thing I did do was to make a presentation on my Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project. It’s a kind of “state of the project” presentation. We are in the midst of designing a major overhaul of our interface in particular, so stay tuned! The entire SunoikisisDC series looks great, so I encourage you to investigate it for more good stuff.
The Rabbinic Citation Network
In a previous post, I shared some work that Mike Sperling and I were doing to visualize and analyze the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud, that is, who cited whom. I am very pleased to announce that we have just released our interactive visualizations, code, and data. We do this in the spirit of free inquiry, collaboration, and the conviction that we can all learn more from each other.
Please explore, play, analyze, and let us know if you have any insights! The site is here.
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.