Posts
Hunting for Unusual Characters in Arabic Script Manuscripts
One of the most potent affordances of manuscript textual production, as opposed to typographic or digital print, is the simple fact that handwriting permits a lot more variation and even downright weirdness in what ends up on the page…
Introducing Our Survey of Digital Workflows Project
Something one often hears in the context of introductions to or apologetics for digital humanities is the idea that all scholars today are in some degree or another “digital humanists.” And while it sounds at this point a bit cliché, it is in fact true: just about everyone who works…
A New Journal of Islamicate DH and A Proposal for an Article Workshopping Group
My OpenITI colleague Taimoor Shahid and I were recently able to—virtually—sit down and have a productive conversation with Eid Ahmed Mohamed and Mai Zaki, the editors of the quite newly launched (first issue comes out in a couple of months) Journal of Digital Islamicate Research, discussing their vision for the…
Introducing the ACDC Project, Part I: Training Data Production and the Diversity of the Islamicate Manuscript Tradition
One of OpenITI’s major deliverables in our most recent round of work is the Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project and ensuing tool, which we are now making available for wider use and experimentation: the relevant code and instructions for installation and use are available on Github, and additional…
The Year in Review: Reflections on OpenITI Pedagogy and Outreach in 2023
As 2023 draws to a close, I wanted to use this last blog post of the year to reflect on OpenITI’s pedagogical and outreach work, or at least the parts with which I have been closely associated. Over the course of the last year, I put together and oversaw two…
Digital Islamicate Manuscript Studies: A Literature Review and Manuscript Walk-Through
I have been meaning to do a review article covering useful resources, recent articles, and other matters that have come up in the course of our fall manuscript studies reading group, but kept putting it off, reasoning I ought to wait until the end of the semester (that, and I…
Digital Islamicate Manuscripts Reading/Working Group 2.0: Spring 2024
After a fall semester of readings and often lively discussion of recent literature in the history of Arabic-script manuscripts, ranging from the life-histories of Qur’anic codices to the transition from manuscript to print, for the upcoming spring semester we’re going to take a somewhat different tack, leaning much more heavily…
On Data Production and Digitized Manuscripts: Some Exploratory Thoughts
From such a starting point, we can then ask: how exactly should we think about electronic texts, about bodies of data, derived from digitized manuscripts? What special concerns, limitations, and possibilities might such a corpus hold vis-à-vis other forms of textual corpora? How do the affordances and informational deposits internal to manuscripts qua manuscripts translate, or not translate, into ‘datafied’ electronic formats? How might quantifiable, computational methods work within such a corpus? What is gained in such a scenario, and what is potentially lost? How can gains be amplified, and losses mitigated, or at least registered?
Traces of the Other: Encounter and Presence in Manuscript Studies
As one of the main components of my work as part of the OpenITI team I spend a great deal of time every day interacting with digitized Islamicate manuscripts: Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, along with a scattering of other languages, vernacular tongues that began to be written down in earnest…
Shajara-i Turk: A 17th-century Turko-Chinggisid Genealogy from Central Asia
We continue our series of guest posts by our summer paleography and codicology course students this week with an exploration by Nurlan Kabdylkhak of the manuscript tradition of an important component text of Central Asian Islamicate literature.
Shajara-i Turk stands out among historical chronicles originating in Central Asia for several compelling…