A common denominator of my current lines of research is an interest in primarily Hebrew sources of the early Middle Ages, that is, a part of Jewish literature of the period that originated in the Eastern Mediterranean. I approach these sources by combining skills derived from my training in literary studies, questions of cultural history, and tools of the computational humanities. Of particular relevance to the COE is my study of the literary representation of the land of Israel in early medieval Jewish sources. For this purpose, I examine selected texts from a wide range of sources and genres of the Geonic period to address the question of how Jews articulated their attitudes towards the land of Israel in their narratives about a land that in the first century CE became the homeland of the most paradigmatic of all diasporas and developed into a peripheral Jewish space, geographically and intellectually, a Jewish borderland first within the Byzantine Empire and later within the Caliphate.