Critical editions are an area where digital technologies can often serve humanities research more effectively than print resources. Even the best critical apparatus in print is laborious to decode, making serious manuscript comparison difficult. Synoptic editions require too many pages, especially if there are numerous extant manuscripts. Publication is expensive and reading the synoptic format is cumbersome.
An electronic critical edition has the potential to address these challenges with a user-friendly interface that allows readers to select the most useful presentation of the text, mark it for their own purposes, and easily link to related information too extensive to print on a single page. That is the vision behind Miklal’s pilot project E-Crit.
The image below is a screenshot from Miklal’s E-Crit pilot project software.
Miklal’s E-Crit pilot project, funded by the American Academy for Jewish Research, has created an open-source program and input a sample text: two passages from four manuscripts of Midrash vaYosha. It allows the reader to
- select texts and layout for comparison
- conduct a simple search
- review background material, translation, notes and commentary
If you are interested in digital resources for textual criticism, please contact us.