Hebrew Manuscript Transcription Hackathon

In 2022, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded, for the first time, a Synergy Grant of 10 million euros to a major Israeli interdisciplinary project dedicated to the study of medieval Hebrew manuscripts through advanced computational tools.

The MiDRASH Project – Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script – is the first initiative of its kind in the fields of Jewish Studies and computational manuscript research.

As part of the project, all manuscripts on the KTIV website will undergo automatic transcription, which will be freely accessible to the public.

We invite the public to take part in improving these transcriptions by reviewing and correcting the results of the automatic process and helping to train the machine-learning models that will enhance them further.

Participants will join the Transcribathon, held both at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem and online, from November 24–27, between 10:00 and 18:00 (Israel time).

This year’s hackathon will focus on semi-cursive Hebrew script. Activities will include reviewing and correcting automatic transcriptions, with full guidance provided for all participants.