Date: April 29, 2009

Speaker: Mark Cohen, Ben Johnston

Title: The Cairo Geniza: Ancient Papers in the Digital Age

Description: The Cairo Geniza is a collection of an estimated 750,000 manuscript pages found discarded for "burial" in the Geniza chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late 19th century. In addition to holding religious poems and fragments of Torah scrolls, the Cairo Geniza contained from 10,000 to 15,000 mundane papers from the medieval period - letters, contracts, wills, and other legal documents from everyday life - preserved in the area’s arid climate. For more than two decades, Cohen and his Princeton colleagues have been working to bring the ancient papers into the digital age. Their work, called the Princeton Geniza Project, has created the world’s only online, searchable-text database of the Cairo Geniza’s historical documents.

In 1986, Cohen and his colleague in the Near Eastern Studies department, Avrom Udovitch, proposed starting a computerized database of geniza documents. IBM and the Near Eastern Studies department supported the effort, and in the past 20 years, with help from technology upgrades and recent grants from the Friedberg Genizah Project and the University, the database has grown to include more than 4,000 documents (as much as a quarter of the historical geniza), available online and searchable in Hebrew and Arabic script or English keywords. The database used for this purpose, called TextGarden, contains transcriptions of Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, and Arabic documents in XML format and allows for the storage of not only the transcriptions themselves, but also of the images, genres, news stories, essays, locations, and people involved with these documents. In this talk, Mark Cohen, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, will discuss the background and challenges of this project. Ben Johnston from Princeton's Educational Technologies Center, who has maintained the TextGarden database since 2006, will speak about the TextGarden database.

Bio: Dr. Mark Cohen is a Professor of Near Eastern Studies. His research specialty is Jews in the Muslim world and the history of Jews in the Middle Ages under Islam. Ben Johnston is an Instructional Designer with the Educational Technologies Center and is manager of the Humanities Resource Center.