SHEBANQ in the Exegesis Classroom: Teaching Exegetical Research with the Receiver of the Digital Humanities Awards 2014

In March 2015 the SHEBANQ project did receive the prestigious Digital Humanties Award of 2014 in the category “Best DH Tool or Suite of Tools”. With funding of CLARIN, the ETCBC developed in cooperation with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences a web-based service under http://shebanq.ancient-data.org/. The service allows for open access to the richly annotated Amsterdam Hebrew database. The user can interact with SHEBANQ on five levels: (a) reading the Hebrew Bible in its plain format (MT) or visualizing any chosen selection of linguistic annotations (morphology, phrase information, clause information, etc.); (b) querying the Hebrew Bible on all its linguistics levels; (c) saving queries as annotations to the Hebrew text and making them publically available if so chosen; (d) hyperlinking ran queries with a persistent identifier (pid) as references in scholarly publication; (e) exporting query results as spreadsheet for further processing in Excel or similar programs. In my presentation I will demonstrate how SHEBANQ can be used in the classroom as a tool for teaching exegetical methodology. I will show how SHEBANQ can help the student to translate his/her exegetical question into a query that transcends the usual limitations that come with word based searches. After students have been introduced to SHEBANQ and learned how to run syntactical queries it has not been seldom that students communicate that they rather use SHEBANQ for Hebrew queries than their personal BibleSoftware installations. My presentation I will first give a short overview on the functionalities that come with SHEBANQ. Second, I will demonstrate the taught process from question to query. Finally, I will explain what SHEBANQ features have been proven to be most useful in the classroom setting.