Digital Mishnah Update

About this demo

The Digital Mishnah Project will provide users with a database of digitized manuscripts of the Mishnah from around the world, along with tools for collation, comparison, and analysis. This demo provides fully marked up transcriptions of twenty-two witnesses to a sample chapter, Bava Metsia ch 2, and illustrates basic functionalities. In a number of cases, the witnesses available for browse expand beyond the sample chapter to include all of Bava Qamma, Bava Metsi'a, and Bava Batra.

	The browse function presents metadata and a rendering of the transcription that which can be viewed with their metadata and approximately as laid out in the original text.
	The collate function allows for the detailed comparison of witnesses. At its core it runs a set of texts through CollateX, which aligns matching words ("tokens"). The Digital Mishnah site remerges this output with the original textual data and represents the results both as an alignment table, and as a text with critical apparatus. The user can determine the passage, the witnesses, and the order. Because we anticipate that a number of users will prefer a parallel-column ("synoptic") presentation, the collate page shows an arrangement of the selected passage arranged in parallel columns by witness in the user-specified order.