Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Cairo Geniza digitization at TAU

CAIRO GENIZA DIGITIZATION AT TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY: Piecing Together the Priceless 'Cairo Genizah' (Science Daily).
Now researchers at Tel Aviv University are working to piece together this illuminating collection, bringing the pages of the texts back together for the first time in centuries. The results are being made available to scholars around the world through a website. Profs. Lior Wolf and Nachum Dershowitz of TAU's Blavatnik School of Computer Science have developed sophisticated software, based on facial recognition technology, that can identify digitized Genizah fragments thought to be a part of the same work and make editorial "joins."

Their technology was developed in close collaboration with the Friedberg Genizah Project, a non-profit organization that seeks to facilitate Genizah research by tracking, cataloguing, and digitizing all the fragments of this collection. The research was presented at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.
More on the Friedberg Geniza Project here. More on manuscript digitization projects here and here.