In the 2012 meeting we plan to hold sessions on two topics:(1) Digital Humanities and Manuscripts, chaired by David Hamidovic and Claire Clivaz. The process of editing of ancient biblical manuscripts, as well as of editing other ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts, has been transformed by the emerging digital culture. The digitalization of the manuscripts raises technical questions, such as automatic reading or multispectral imagery, and leads us to new challenges. How do we understand the "text" in the digital culture? In addition, the capacity to study and valorize online a specific manuscript challenges the notion of “critical edition”.?The seminar welcomes proposals of papers about ancient Hebrew, Greek or Arabic manuscripts - either literary or documentary texts - in the fields of biblical studies, early Jewish and Christian studies. We hope to receive papers either on technical points, or new interpretations with digitalization or data managing, or questions about the notion of “critical edition”.
(2) Digital Humanities and Academic Publishing, chaired by Andrew Gregory and Claire Clivaz. In the digital culture, the way of looking after sources and data, as well as the way of academic publishing is drastically evolving. The seminar would like to investigate how digital tools and culture influence research on biblical studies, early Jewish and early?Christian studies, from scholarly and editing/publishing points of view. Topics such as new ways of publishing/editing (interactive publications, preprint peer-review, multimedia publications, etc.), or data research and management (the evaluation of websites in research, GIS tools, the use of Wikipedia in teaching, etc.) are welcomed, as well as papers on epistemological reflection on scholarship in the digital culture.