Scripta Qumranica Electronica
By means of computerized analytical tools and the new possibilities afforded by digital visualizations of data, the Scripta Qumranica Electronica project seeks to expand upon traditional methods of scrolls studies and to bring them into the new millennium. This aim will be achieved through the production of online workspaces for the reconstruction of ancient manuscripts and for textual analysis of the compositions they contain, providing an Environment for Digital Scholarly Editions of the Qumran Texts. The backbone of the project is two large specialized databases: the Digital Images and cataloguing database published online as the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, which is curated, updated, and maintained by the Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem, and the Textual and Linguistic Database, which was created for the Qumran-Wörterbuch-Projekt (Qumran Dictionary Project, QWB) housed at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
The basic idea behind the project is to connect two major scholarly databases for the first time, and to make all data usable to provide the means to produce a Digital Scholarly Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. First envisioned in a smaller range, one of the driving forces behind the project was (among a number of contributors from the field) Prof. Dr. Shani Tzoref from the University of Potsdam who is, albeit no member in the strict sense, still a personal cooperation partner and counsellor of the Göttingen Team. In a way, the project can be described as an expanded and updated version of an envisioned earlier project by Tzoref.
