With the development of tools and techniques, scholars are now able to engage with material culture in more scientific ways and in much higher capacities. The digitization efforts that institutions around the world have initiated have provided access to millions of documents that scholars would previously have been able to access only if they were physically present at the location or could receive a scan by mail, if permission was granted. The searchable text databases have pushed forward what scholars are able to look for at a moment’s notice, but these depend on the transcriptions and publications being made available through the database, and are not guaranteed to cover the whole corpus of data. As the task for accessible information is being pushed forward, a new technology is emerging that is enabling fast and accurate automatic transcriptions. While not yet perfect, the transcriptions are, in many cases, accurate enough to substantially streamline the transcription process for critical editions, but more so to enable searches for material of interest that may have been previously unknown to scholars.
Armand Rogers will be sharing my experience building and using this technology for Jewish texts and discussing accuracy, usability, limitations, and future applications.