Most readers here, I imagine, live in countries where rights and responsibilities in the social plane are officially not apportioned with reference to gender. Broadly, this is because it is a matter of principle that women and men function as equal members of society. How well this actually plays out in practice is another matter, […]
Of course, people say “um, no actually” to me, being female. It wasn’t the handless guy’s fault he had no hands, it’s not my fault I’m female. He just didn’t have the physical makeup to write a valid Torah and that was too bad; I don’t have the physical makeup to write a valid Torah […]
Backtracking a bit to the experience of writing. I talked about producing letters as not necessarily being writing. Specifically, embossing (the process of creating a shape by pressing up from the other side) isn’t really writing. We might say: ah, but Braille is created by embossing, and today there are lots of people for whom […]
I also have to deal with a certain amount of, let’s say, cognitive dissonance. In my travels, I’ve given scrolls (usually megillot) I’ve written to various traditional-Orthodox types, and the response is, quite often, “Goodness me, this is very nice, very nice indeed…” until they discover that I wrote it. Then their opinion abruptly changes; […]
Talking of inaccessible. This part of the proofreading process is hard for me to access. I don’t own the fancy software, not many people do since it’s so expensive (multiple thousands of dollars, I understand). Most people send their scrolls away to have someone else do the scanning part. Well, that’s hard for me, because […]
The misplaced expectation that a computer can infallibly check a Torah also touches on a deeper concept, that of the experience of writing. What does it mean to write? is a question that has always been part of the Torah-writing rules. Could you, for instance, embroider the Torah? Is that writing? What about carving letters […]
Proofreading a Torah is a tremendous task, requiring much memory and data processing and demanding infallible accuracy. Computers, of course, have much memory and data processing ability, and are notoriously accurate. Having established that computer checking can be part of proofreading, one frequently hears the question “Why can’t the computer do it all?” I think […]
Even this process, though, isn’t completely foolproof. Humans run the software, and as soon as humans come on the scene, there’s potential for human error. If the various software operations aren’t applied properly – like forgetting to run the spellcheck on a document – the software won’t flag up problems because it won’t have looked […]
The other form of computer checking involves much more sophisticated software, and further reduces the chance of human error. In the process we’ve just been talking about, the letters were fed to me automatically, but I still had to use my brain to identify them and see that they were kosher. In this process, there’s […]
Erm, hem, Part 19 seems to have been exactly the same as Part 18, bit of overenthusiastic copying & pasting there. Normal service will resume tomorrow.
