Pre Pub: Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud

We have pretty decent source files for this, so we're not having to key the whole 25,000 pages from scratch. It is going to require a fair bit of data type work, but honestly the biggest factor in how quickly this one will get done is how many of y'all order it.

I get really excited when we produce a body of literature that has lots of linking opportunities, because I think data type linking is what makes using Logos so much faster than wading through print resources. If you're reading a print book and it cites something like a Talmud reference, you have to be pretty motivated to track down a print volume and find the right spot to examine the context of the reference. But when it's all linked up in a Logos book, it becomes so much easier to follow up on whatever trails your study suggests and dig as deep as you want to go. From that standpoint, the Talmuds are easily one of the most important pre-pubs we've ever offered. There are certainly many tens of thousands of references (perhaps even a few hundred thousand, but it'd take awhile to find them all, what with all the different methods of abbreviation and transliteration used) to the Talmuds in the books Logos has published so far, so I hope this pre-pub gets a lot of attention.

Nathan Barnes said:

if everyone orders this

Well, I quickly got on this bandwagon!!!

I did a search to see how many of my resources already reference the Talmud in some form or fashion, and there's definitely a lot of resources that mention it!

14,411 results in 7,576 articles in 434 resources.

Oh, man, this looks awesome! I jumped on it right away.

Jason Saling said:

I did a search to see how many of my resources already reference the Talmud in some form or fashion, and there's definitely a lot of resources that mention it!

14,411 results in 7,576 articles in 434 resources.

34,546 results in 16,348 articles in 1,191 resources for me.

Rosie Perera said:

34,546 results in 16,348 articles in 1,191 resources for me.

I'm guessing these numbers are for searching on things like 'Talmud*' across your entire library (I'm getting 46,000 hits that way on this machine, which has about half of the Logos library loaded on it). Perhaps it is belaboring the obvious that there are scads of citations that will just list a tractate name or tractate abbreviation without writing 'Talmud' anywhere in the context - the same way we cite John 3:16 without including the word 'Bible'.

The permutations you'd have to search for to find everything AND filter out the false positives in a world without data type tags are dizzying. Just the first tractate (of the 49 covered between the two Talmuds) can be spelled Berakot, Berakoth, Berakhot, Berakhoth, Berachoth, Berachot and abbreviated as Ber or bBer to explicitly specify the Babylonian Talmud, or either jBer, yBer or pBer (all refering to the same Jerusalem/Palestinian/Yerushalmi Talmud) or mBer for the Mishnah or tBer for the Tosephta. So until the data type tagging makes it easy to find the references no matter how they are spelled, it'd be a lot of work to figure out exactly how many citations are floating around out there. But I'm guessing it'll turn out to be rather a lot more than the numbers being kicked around here.

Vincent Setterholm said:

Rosie Perera said:

34,546 results in 16,348 articles in 1,191 resources for me.

I'm guessing these numbers are for searching on things like 'Talmud*' across your entire library

 

Just "Talmud" without the wildcard character.

Vincent Setterholm said:

Perhaps it is belaboring the obvious that there are scads of citations that will just list a tractate name or tractate abbreviation without writing 'Talmud' anywhere in the context - the same way we cite John 3:16 without including the word 'Bible'.

Good point, and it isn't belaboring the obvious, as I obviously wasn't thinking. Not being that familiar with the Talmud I'd forgotten that of course there would be citations like biblical ones. And in that case, probably most of the hits I found for Talmud in my library are just passing mentions of it and don't have citations that would need links.

Vincent Setterholm said:

The permutations you'd have to search for to find everything AND filter out the false positives in a world without data type tags are dizzying.

 

I'm not even going to try. That's what we pay you all to do for us. [:)]

Dave Hooton said:

Berakot, Berakoth, Berakhot, Berakhoth, Berachoth, Berachot, Ber, bBer, jBer, yBer, pBer, mBer, tBer

gives a few extra results (but use Match Case to eliminate false positives,  particularly on Ber).

With your recommendations it gives me 4026 in 1864 articles in 228 resources. It still gives a few false references (like Ber' Odach Baladan...) but it gives fair feeling of the number of references to Talmud in the Platinum + many other resources, library.

EDIT:  The word "Talmud" gives me 21744 references in 10875 articles in 610 resources.

While all of the Netherlands seems to go out of their minds because of the World Cup final tomorrow evening, this prepub is what makes me really, really excited.

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Dave Hooton said:

Berakot, Berakoth, Berakhot, Berakhoth, Berachoth, Berachot, Ber, bBer, jBer, yBer, pBer, mBer, tBer

gives a few extra results (but use Match Case to eliminate false positives,  particularly on Ber).

I got 11,423 results in 4,387 articles in 638 resources (and I am on the pre-pub ordering bandwagon as well!) I love the historical/Jewish/early tradition resources...

I think maybe the fact that the title says "(50 vols)" might be a put-off to some people. They might think it's some vast studious set of resources about the Talmud rather than the Talmud itself. When something like this comes into your Logos library, the fact that it's multiple volumes is almost immaterial. (In fact, it literally is immaterial! [:)]) It's more like a commentary set than a collection of all different books on a topic. I wish that could somehow be communicated better in the title. Then again, I suppose people who know what the Talmud is are the only ones who are prospective purchasers of this, and it's not universally known. But frankly I'm kind of surprised that this hasn't been flying off the shelf faster.