Hebrew Genre Atlas (HGA), Version 2.1: Genre- and Subject-Related Metadata for Hebrew Manuscript Records

The Hebrew Genre Atlas (HGA), Version 2.1, is a structured dataset of Hebrew manuscript text occurrences based on the SfarData database and metadata from the Hebrew manuscript catalogue of the National Library of Israel (NLI). The dataset brings together manuscript-level and text-level information for 3,216 securely dated manuscripts, mostly from the ninth to the sixteenth century and from six geocultural regions. Manuscript-level fields include information such as dating, geocultural attribution, script, extent, and whether a manuscript is recorded as a single-text or multi-text manuscript. Text-occurrence-level fields include titles, identifiers, catalogue-derived genre/subject metadata, normalized genre/subject labels, and text-level extent information where available. The main purpose of the HGA is to make catalogue-derived genre/subject metadata analyzable together with manuscript and text-occurrence metadata. This allows users to investigate patterns in the distribution of texts, genres, manuscript types, and textual extent across time and geocultural regions. In this release, “genre” refers to normalized library, catalogue, subject, genre, and form information associated with manuscript records and text occurrences, not to a comprehensive literary-theoretical classification of Hebrew texts. HGA Version 2.1 includes 9,214 text-occurrence records. The dataset can be used to explore questions such as: - which genres or subject categories are recorded for manuscripts from particular periods or regions;- how text occurrences are distributed across single-text and multi-text manuscripts;- how manuscript extent and text-occurrence extent relate to genre/subject metadata.