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Computer scientists at Tel Aviv University are using artificial intelligence to gather the fragments of the world's largest collection of medieval documents, the legendary Cairo Genizah, to tell the story of 1,000 years of Jewish history and culture.
They have reconstructed more than 1,000 documents from 350,000 individual items found in the Cairo storage room: more in the past few months, than in 110 years of conventional scholarship.
Several scholars believe that in some ways, the contents of the Cairo Genizah are more important than the Dead Sea Scrolls. While the Dead Sea scrolls were the religious literature of a small sect that lived in the desert for a few years, the Cairo Genizah told the story of the day-to-day details of a millennium of Jewish life, from the mundane to the magnificent.
What the Tel Aviv researchers are doing will revolutionize that search. While some of the archive includes complete letters, manuscripts and documents, much of it consists of fragments, some containing only a few words, or pages out of context. The fragments will be spread out through 70 different libraries and museums around the world. One page of a letter could be in Oslo and another in Philadelphia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Geniza
