Ilanot 2

Jewish mystical cosmographs—ilanot (“trees”)—have been central to the practice of Kabbalah since the fourteenth century but, until recently, were ignored by scholars. These “Maps of God” present formidable challenges to today’s researchers, however. Their thorough integration of extensive texts and complex diagrammatic images on large parchment rolls complicates both their analysis as well as their presentation in scientific editions.
The cooperating teams of the proposed project successfully developed a basic infrastructure to address these challenges in a previous collaboration that focused on medieval artifacts. Building on their achievements, a range of general enhancements are planned, including many specifically oriented to the corpus at the heart of this new project, early modern ilanot: (1) the application of text-reuse and NLP technologies to identify textual elements in the ilanot with shared characteristics; (2) the development of an ontology-based navigation and visualisation interface; (3) the improvement of the full-text search via NLP results and the development of a specialised ElasticSearch Analyzer; (4) the description of ilanot in terms of topological map-like spatial features; (5) the description of ilanot feature iconographic and textual variation; (6) the migration and integration of all data from the University of Haifa Ilanot database into the Maps of God infrastructure. Resources will also be allocated to the enhancement of the end-user experience as well as to ensuring the long-term viability of the platform.