4.0316 Jewish Inscriptions Project (1/50)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 25 Jul 90 17:36:14 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0316. Wednesday, 25 Jul 1990.

Date: Tue, 24 Jul 90 17:16:48 BST
From: Douglas de Lacey <DEL2@PHOENIX.CAMBRIDGE.AC.UK>
Subject: Jewish Inscriptions Project

Members of HUMANIST may be interested in the following details, and I
would certainly be interested in any reactins they may have.

Regards,
Douglas de Lacey <DEL2@PHX.CAM.AC.UK>

The Jewish Inscriptions Project at the University of Cambridge (JIP)
The Faculty of Divinity
St John's Street,
Cambridge CB2 1TW.
Tel: +44-223-332580

Contact: Dr DR de Lacey
Tel: +44-223-335019
fax: +44-223-464230
e-mail: DEL2@UK.AC.CAM.PHX / DEL2@PHX.CAM.AC.UK

The Jewish Inscriptions Project (JIP) at Cambridge has as its goal the
collection of all epigraphic material related to Jews and Judaism in the
Graeco-Roman world (roughly, Alexander the Great to Gregory the Great)
into a single database as a tool for scholarly research. It is
currently funded by the British Academy. Planned publications include
index, concordance and corpus materials for selected regions. A
longer-term goal is the production of an electronic format of the
database with a package which will allow scholars to define their own
analyses of the material. Individual members of the Project are also
working on prosopographical and historical studies aided by the database.

Languages involved include Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin.

Texts were input by hand, and we also express gratitude to Dr J
Mansfield of Cornell who made some of his texts available to us. At
present we are concentrating on a hard-copy publication of the materials
from Egypt and Cyrenaica, and inputting material for the next phase
(Italy excluding Rome).

The personnel involved in the project are as follows:

Dr GI Davies;Dr W Horbury; Miss JM Reynolds (Directors);
Prof JA Emerton; Dr DM Lewis; Dr NRM de Lange; Dr T Rajak (Senior Advisers);
Dr DR de Lacey (Senior Research Associate);
Dr DE Noy (Research Assistant).

Currently the database is entered in MUSCATEL format. This allows
conversion to a wide range of other formats as necessary, either
hard-copy using an in-house text processor developed by Dr de Lacey
or other electronic formats such as COCOA. A program is available to
format the text for the Ibycus Scholarly Computer, and it could
probably also be flagged for other multilingual textprocessors such
as NotaBene.