09 June 2019

It is with great pleasure that I announce the decision of the National Science Centre, Poland to finance my research project The Supernatural Entities and Their Relationships with Humans according to the Babylonian Talmud from the Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives (SONATA 14; Registration number: 2018/31/D/HS1/00513). Since this project relies heavily on the EvT database you can expect three things to happen in the following 3 years.
First and foremost, some essential updates to the inventory are on their way. Although not much will be going on with regard to the Talmudic contents of the database, I have been rebuilding the tag structure to get a more coherent and logical system. Within next months I will upload the database with the significantly improved tag ontology. Later on I plan to add new analytical parameters to describe even more formal aspects of the text – more on this in one of the future posts.
Second, the main material result of the ongoing project will be the monograph detailing the world of the supernatural entities of the Babylonian Talmud and their relationships with humans. It turned out that after more than two years of cataloging the units, counting the tags and drawing the schemes I have collected numerous stories and observations which I will be more than glad to share in the form of a book.
Third, I hope to present some of these stories and observations in the form of research papers and conference presentations in the near future.
Most importantly, however, this project will result in far better theoretical and methodological grounding of the EvT inventory what will eventually allow for the realization of its initial purpose which had been the inclusion of all the important corpi of the early rabbinic literature, especially the Jerusalem Talmud.