Text for D-GESS financing board
Mispar – a digital edition for the study of medieval Hebrew arithmetic
Introduction
Mispar is a MediaWiki based database which hosts annotated transcripts of almost all surviving Hebrew medieval arithmetic and algebraic treatises, as well as a few Hebrew geometric, Arabic and Judeo-Arabic treatises. It is open to the public via https://mispar.ethz.ch Mispar is cooperating with the Peshat project hosted at University of Hamburg. The Mispar database and the website itself is hosted by Informatikdienste ETH Zurich. Mispar is online since 2017 and has been gradually developed and improved since.
In order to make the information more accessible, a custom-made annotation system YATA was developed in PHP language by Scientific IT Services at ETH Zurich. It allows to annotate text passages, mathematical formulas as well as whole pages. All annotations can be categorised in a hierarchical way, while multiple categorisations per annotation are possible. A query language has been developed to retrieve the data and present the results in a nicely rendered table, containing the annotated text and the deep-link to the annotated passage. The annotation system works as a plug-in for MediaWiki.
Further Developments
While the system currently runs stable, a number of improvements are planned to make the system fit for the future. To name a few:
-
Upgrade to the latest MediaWiki version. Since the first version of Mispar, the underlying MediaWiki has not been updated. We currently use version
1.28.0
, however the latest version is1.37.2
. While the currently used version is working flawlessly, is not officially supported anymore. A few important breaking changes have been introduced since1.28.0
, so this upgrade means also work on the code and the API we are using. - Migrate to SIS infrastructure. The current Mispar website is hosted on a webserver by Basisdienste. We would like to be more flexible where to host the Mispar website, use Docker containers instead of classical webservers. The database (a PostGres database) will remain hosted at Basisdienste.
- Search and categories improvements. A number of smaller improvements have been identified, especially certain categories edge-cases and UI improvements (ambiguous categories, unintentional deletions, auto-expand sections of search results, etc.). All of them focus on increasing the user experience.
- Improved rendering of math formulas. The mathematical terms are currently rendered as PNG graphics in a quite low resolution. We would like to switch to modern, scalable SVG vector graphics instead.