The aim of the project is to map the Jewish presence in the Byzantine empire using GIS (Geographical Information Systems). All information (published and unpublished) about the Jewish communities will be gathered and collated.

The data will be incorporated in a GIS which will be made freely available to the general public on the world-wide-web. Joshua Starr’s Jews in the Byzantine Empire consists of two parts, a synthetic account and a source book comprising English translations, notes and bibliographical references. The same format was adopted more recently by Steven Bowman for his Jews of Byzantium 1204–1453, which sets out to extend Starr’s pioneering work to the period after the Latin conquest of Constantinople. Two books on the subject appeared in the intervening years