The "Inscriptions
from the Land of Israel" (hereafter ILI) project
was
officially launched by Michael Satlow in 1996. This initial prototype
was produced under the auspices of, and with generous support from, the
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of
Virginia. The primary goal of this prototype was to develop a data
architecture (the DTD, or "Document Type Definition") that would
allow
for encoding inscriptions in a way that would be maximally useful for
scholarly and pedagogical purposes. The prototype encoded the
inscriptions in English translation only from the catacombs of Bet
She'arim, a late antique Jewish burial site located not far from modern
day Haifa. At that time, it was technically too challenging to encode
the Greek and Hebrew texts, as Unicode was an emerging standard that had
few tools available for its entry or display. This project also
experimented with a geographical interface that would allow users to
better view inscriptions within their wider context.
Satlow moved to Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1999, and began work on the next phase of the project with the help of the Indiana University Digital Library Project. From 1999-2002, the DTD was converted into XML and, with technological advances in the application of Unicode, it became increasingly possible to encode and search Greek and Hebrew texts. During these years we also worked on user interfaces and ways of better integrating geographical data into the project. Many of these contributions were not implemented before Satlow left IU in 2002 to move to Brown University, but the skeleton of a second prototype can be seen here.
The project is now housed at Brown
University, under the technical
auspices of the Scholarly Technology Group.
Copyright (C) 1996 by Michael L. Satlow, all rights reserved. This text may
be shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law.
Redistribution or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium,
requires consent of the author and notification of the publisher, the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.