How we go about it
The early stages
The first nine months of the project were devoted to developing the conceptual framework of the Typology. This framework will continue to change and develop during the subsequent three years of the project.
We developed the framework by discussing four to six documents in detail in monthly meetings. We started from an initial set of points of description which resulted from our intuitive familiarity with many of the project documents, and from a number of theoretical assumptions. Each team member prepared one or two original documents, providing an initial analysis of its perspective, overall shape, unity, and small forms, as well as identifying the special conceptual problems it poses.
After about four months of this work some of the larger groupings of features now characterising our Typology emerged. We kept putting more documents into the mix, and the framework became more organised and explicit, as well as more comprehensive and complex. Each new set of documents, as discussed at the meetings, fed into a new version of the Typology.
Developing the Inventory of Structurally Important Literary Features
A draft Typology document emerged in July 2008. It contained 12 main headings and several hundred subordinate literary features which a text might have (although no text will have all of them). By the same time 40 text descriptions had been created, most of them reflecting earlier versions of the Typology and standing in need of revision. (Click here to see a list of the documents whose discussion fed into the creation of the July 2008 Typology.)
This mutual feedback -- between the empirical investigation of specific documents on the one hand and the conceptual framework on the other -- continued throughout the duration of the project. In 2011 the Typology had developed into a more refined document, the Inventory of Structurally Important Literary Features in the Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literatures of Antiquity.
Developing the Database
Between 2008 and 2011, the project entered a new phase. This consisted of the creation of a database which 1) stores the structure of the Typology and 2) uses the structure as a prompt for the creation of new document profiles by the team researchers. The final online version of this database will be made available to the public without restrictions as soon as the document profiles are completed (in early 2012).