Judaica DH at the Penn Libraries Blog //DataDeepDive: Writing Exercises
Blog //DataDeepDive: Writing Exercises

In this series, we take a deep dive into the Talk boards tags to look at how volunteers classify the fragments. You can read an overview of our Talk boards tags in the Sorting Phase Data review.

Writing exercises are easily identifiable by their repetition. Rather than practicing words or phrases, students write lines of repeating characters, over and over and over.

Volunteers used the tags #practice, #exercise, and #schoolbook in the project these writing exercises. These easily identifiable fragments may be formal exercise-books to the actual practice sheets written by children.

Scholars like Dr. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger examine children’s exercise books from the Cairo Geniza to learn about reading and writing in the medieval era. Combined with letters and documents about schools, these fragments are a source for understanding how young Jewish children learned basic literary skills. Subject 30747008: B 5712, The University of Manchester Library Subject 11597775: ENA 2235, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary Subject 30738452: A 573, The University of Manchester Library

Sometimes students were distracted, drawing alongside their practice… Subject 12506575: ENA 2845.7, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary

While the majority of writing exercises found in the Cairo Geniza are written in Hebrew script, we have also found examples in Arabic script! Subject 30297553: Ar. 194–10, The University of Manchester Library

👉 Read more Talk conversations or start your own by participating in Scribes of the Cairo Geniza on Zooniverse!

By Judaica DH at the Penn Libraries on .

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Exported from Medium on April 14, 2020.

Cite this post: admin. “DataDeepDive: Writing Exercises”. Published July 09, 2019. https://judaicadh.github.io//blog/2019-07-09-datadeepdive/. Accessed on .