#DataDeepDive: Writing Exercises
In this series, we take a deep dive into the Talk boards tags to look at how volunteers classify the fragments. You can read an overview of our Talk boards tags in the Sorting Phase Data review.
Writing exercises are easily identifiable by their repetition. Rather than practicing words or phrases, students write lines of repeating characters, over and over and over.
Volunteers used the tags #practice, #exercise, and #schoolbook in the project these writing exercises. These easily identifiable fragments may be formal exercise-books to the actual practice sheets written by children.
Scholars like Dr. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger examine children’s exercise books from the Cairo Geniza to learn about reading and writing in the medieval era. Combined with letters and documents about schools, these fragments are a source for understanding how young Jewish children learned basic literary skills.
Sometimes students were distracted, drawing alongside their practice…
While the majority of writing exercises found in the Cairo Geniza are written in Hebrew script, we have also found examples in Arabic script!
👉 Read more Talk conversations or start your own by participating in Scribes of the Cairo Geniza on Zooniverse!