Corpus Masoreticum

Funded by the German Research Foundation, Corpus Masoreticum is a long-term project set to run for twelve years. The Corpus Masoreticum project engages with the Western European Ashkenazi Masorah tradition between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Using and further developing methods of Digital Humanities, Corpus Masoreticum uncovers Forgotten Cultures of Knowledge and aims at shedding light on the cultural background of the Western European Masoretic traditions and text cultures.

The Corpus Masoreticum project aims to use advanced methods of Digital Humanities to show and analyse what kind of Masorah and Bible text traditions are found on selected pages of Ashkenazi Bibles. For this purpose, BIMA 2.0 has been developed. It is a collaborative digital and open source work environment, database, and user interface. BIMA 2.0 allows editors to transcribe, translate, and analyse Masorah in a workspace in which image and text are immediately visually linked by means of coloured text paths directly drawn on the surface of the high-quality images of manuscript pages. BIMA 2.0 displays the manuscripts via IIIF-protocol. For the first time, diplomatic digital editions will not only provide the reader with the edited material in linear form, but also have the edition connected to its form and layout. The relationship between the micrographic image and its philological content becomes visible and interpretable. This will allow further research on the question of how knowledge was gathered and distributed, hidden and encoded.

These editions, which will be supplemented with additional content and functions for users over the course of time, can be accessed online on BIMA 2.0. As part of its outreach to the scientific community, Corpus Masoreticum has installed an international advisory board and issues its own publication series: Corpus Masoreticum Working Papers (CMWP). By way of public outreach, two documentary videos on the project’s objectives and methods have been produced:
Video - BIMA 2.0
Video - Corpus Masoreticum: Introduction