Workshop: “Building a Knowledge Graph of Classical Rabbinic Literature”

A knowledge graph represents relationships among people, texts, places, concepts, and other entities as a network. Classical rabbinic literature, composed approximately between 70 and 600 CE and including the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, contains a dense web of such relationships: texts cite and interpret other texts; rabbis cite one another and appear in groups and chains of transmission; and people and passages are connected to places, legal questions, and broader topics.

This workshop will describe how we are using artificial intelligence and other digital tools to build a knowledge graph of this literature, how the graph can be used, and its potential to open new avenues of research in the field.

Michael L. Satlow is professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University. He specializes in the history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity. His most recent books are An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity and How the Bible Became Holy. He is the founder and director of the “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine” project, a digital corpus of ancient inscriptions from the region, and is now working with a research team in Israel on creating a networked approach to all of rabbinic literature. He has held fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright program, among others.