Great news for the fourth anniversary of the EvT project website (established February 11th 2017)! My project titled The Construction of the Database of the Supernatural Entities in the Hebrew Bible using the System of the Elyonim veTachtonim Project has won the financial support (Excellence Initiative, [H.1.12.2020] MiniGRANTY POB Heritage) issued by the Jagiellonian University. This means that within the next year you can expect the first version of the inventory covering the biblical supernatural entities.

 

The abstract:

The present minigrant tackles the subject of the supernatural entities (angels, demons, ghosts and monsters) present in the Hebrew Bible from the perspective of the cognitive science of religion and using the methods of digital humanities.
The main purpose of the project is to construct the electronic inventory of these entities using the principles of the Elyonim veTachtonim mother-project (https://elyonimvetachtonim.project.uj.edu.pl/), until now used to analyze the traditions of the Babylonian Talmud. The resulting database will serve as a thematic concordance (covering such categories as class and type of the supernatural entity, genre of the textual unit and the sphere of life recognized by the text) and will allow to perform various calculations and data modelling. The inventory together with the documentation will be published on the Elyonim veTachtonim project web site, while the whole process will be described in a paper published in the journal recognized by the ministerial list. The project involves the students' participation (recruited from the yearlong thematic seminar Supernatural Entities - Cognitive Perspective).
The project will result in the first and only such tool available in the world, accessible to everyone interested, for free, without the need of expensive equipment or software. The endeavor is developed on the borders of various disciplines and sub-disciplines of humanities and social sciences and as such broadens the borders of humanities by implementing digital methods and innovative techniques borrowed from software development (e.g. open source, forking, database iterativity).