AI transcription to create “Facebook of the Middle Ages”

Researchers are utilizing a transcription tool that leverages artificial intelligence to decode a digital database of Jewish manuscripts dating back over a thousand years.

While over 400,000 medieval Jewish documents from the Cairo Geniza collection have already been digitized, most of its items remain uncatalogued. Many are fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have been transcribed.

By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers working on the transcription project, called MiDRASH, claim they can now access and analyze the entire collection far more quickly, cross-referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.

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The project has already made significant progress in uncovering a 16th-century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt, with his reply written in the margins, detailing his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.

Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel's digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.

Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers, said: "The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes.”

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