New Digital Strategies for Creating and Comparing the Content Structure of Biblical Manuscripts

Abstract

In an era when more and more manuscript scholarship is taking place on the internet, through digital manuscripts, databases and electronic publishing, there is a corresponding and growing need among scholars for flexible and creative ways to create clear and coherent online manuscript descriptions. This article presents a prototype of a tool, currently under development at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität, Munich, which aims to streamline the description process from the perspective of facilitating comparisons between manuscripts from different cultural areas. Presently, the tool is being developed for use with biblical manuscripts and the article outlines the challenges that come with creating and comparing this kind of material, which is often similar in terms of content but very diverse as to its structure. It then offers solutions that allow users to describe and compare the manuscripts at differing levels of granularity. Lastly, the article sets forth a pattern of use that could be transposed onto areas of manuscript studies beyond biblical manuscripts and offers perspectives for the tool’s wider application.