The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland present:
Digitizing the Cairo Genizah Collections Dr. Roni Shweka Harry Starr Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University
Wednesday, April 29, 2015 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm MITH Conference Room 0301 Hornbake Library North
The Cairo Genizah is a unique treasure trove of medieval Jewish manuscripts, comprising about 250,000 fragments written mainly in the 10th to the 13th centuries. During the last years this collection, currently spread-out in about 60 libraries in Europe, North America and Israel, has been digitized by the Friedberg Genizah Project almost in full, producing some 450,000 digital images. The lecture will introduce this collection and will present some of the modules and tools that have been developed for automatically extracting data from the digital images, joining the dispersed fragments, and locating fragments by a specific handwriting.
Dr. Roni Shweka (PhD, Rabbinic Literature, Hebrew University, 2009) is currently a Harry Starr Fellow in the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His main fields are Jewish law in the Geonic period (8th-11th centuries) and the research of the Cairo Genizah. He is an Academic Advisor in Genazim: The Friedberg Genizah Project Computerization Unit.
For more information, visit the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies website, or email Debra Kirsch.