Among Digitized Manuscripts


Book Description

If you work with digital photos of manuscripts or archival materials, Among Digitized Manuscripts provides the conceptual and practical toolbox for you to create a state-of-the-art methodology and workflow. No previous computer knowledge is required.




Among Digitized Manuscripts. Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World


Book Description

Working with manuscripts has become a digital affair. But, are there downsides to digital photos? And how can you take advantage of the incredible computing power you have literally at your fingertips? Cornelis van Lit explains in detail what happens when manuscript studies meets digital humanities. In Among Digitized Manuscripts you will learn why it is important to include a note on the photo quality in your codicological description, how to draw, collect, and publish glyphs of paleographic interest, what standards (such as TEI and IIIF) to abide by when transcribing a text, how to write custom software for image recognition, and much more. The leading principle is that learning a little about computers will already be of great benefit.




Die Rifāʽīya aus Damaskus


Book Description

In Die Rifāʽīya spürt Boris Liebrenz der Buchkultur des Osmanischen Syrien (16. - 19. Jahrhundert) durch den Fokus der einzig überlebenden Privatbibliothek der Epoche nach. Er fragt nach der Produktion und Transmission von Wissen sowie dem sozialen Hintergrund der Leserschaft im Zeitalter der Handschrift. Studien der arabischen Bibliotheksgeschichte haben oft nur das Mittelalter in den Blick genommen und basierten fast ausschließlich auf literarischen Quellen. Dies ist die erste Monographie, die eine einzige Region während der Osmanischen Periode in den Fokus nimmt und deren auf uns gekommene Handschriften und Notizen ihrer Leser und Besitzer systematisch als dokumentarische Quelle benutzt. So erhellt sie die materiellen, rechtlichen und sozialen Voraussetzungen von Buchbesitz und Lesepraxis. In Die Rifāʽīya Boris Liebrenz explores the book culture of Ottoman Syria (16th to 19th century), using the only surviving Damascene private library of the time as a vantage point. He asks about the production and transmission of knowledge as well as the social background of the reading audience in a manuscript age. Scholarship on Arabic libraries has often focussed on the medieval period and relied nearly exclusively on literary accounts. This is the first book-length study that focuses on a single region in the Ottoman period and systematically uses the vast number of surviving manuscripts as a documentary source by means of the notes left by their readers and possessors. Thus, it sheds light on the material, juridical, and social basis of book-ownership and reading.




World of Image in Islamic Philosophy


Book Description

One of the most controversial issues that divided Islamic philosophers and theologians during the Middle Ages was whether human beings would have a spiritual or bodily existence after death. The idea of a world of image was conceived as a solution, suggesting that there exists a world of non-physical (imagined) bodies, beyond our earthly existence. This world may be reached in sleep, in meditation or after death.From the embryonic conception by Ibn Sina, to the radical rethinking by Suhrawardi and Shahrazuri into a sophisticated system, L. W. C. van Lit unravels the history of this idea. Using a distant reading approach for measuring the transmission, he further shows how the idea remained relevant for Muslim thinkers through the centuries, up until today.




Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture


Book Description

Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture presents an overview of the digital turn in Ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts visualisation, data mining and communication. Edited by David Hamidović, Claire Clivaz and Sarah Bowen Savant, it gathers together the contributions of seventeen scholars involved in Biblical, Early Jewish and Christian studies. The volume attests to the spreading of digital humanities in these fields and presents fundamental analysis of the rise of visual culture as well as specific test-cases concerning ancient manuscripts. Sophisticated visualisation tools, stylometric analysis, teaching and visual data, epigraphy and visualisation belong notably to the varied overview presented in the volume.




Traces of the Old, Uses of the New


Book Description

Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods—methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others.




Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies


Book Description

The present volume is the main achievement of the Research Networking Programme 'Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies', funded by the European Science Foundation in the years 2009-2014. It is the first attempt to introduce a wide audience to the entirety of the manuscript cultures of the Mediterranean East. The chapters reflect the state of the art in such fields as codicology, palaeography, textual criticism and text editing, cataloguing, and manuscript conservation as applied to a wide array of language traditions including Arabic, Armenian, Avestan, Caucasian Albanian, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Slavonic, Syriac, and Turkish. Seventy-seven scholars from twenty-one countries joined their efforts to produce the handbook. The resulting reference work can be recommended both to scholars and students of classical and oriental studies and to all those involved in manuscript research, digital humanities, and preservation of cultural heritage. The volume includes maps, illustrations, indexes, and an extensive bibliography.




Claim to the Country


Book Description

Consists of all the notebook pages, watercolours and drawings that comprise the bulk of the Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek /Xam and !Kun (Bushmen) archive, with photographs, documents, letters and notes, as well as contextualizing essays and an index for the included narratives and contributors.




Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber


Book Description

Edited by organisers of “Digital Classicist” seminars in London and Berlin, this volume explores the impact of computational approaches to the study of antiquity on audiences other than the scholars who conventionally publish it. In addition to colleagues in classics and digital humanities, the eleven chapters herein concern and are addressed to students, heritage professionals and “citizen scientists”. Each chapter is a scholarly contribution, presenting research questions in the classics, digital humanities or, in many cases, both. They are all also examples of work within one of the most important areas of academia today: scholarly research and outputs that engage with collaborators and audiences not only including our colleagues, but also students, academics in different fields including the hard sciences, professionals and the broader public. Collaboration and scholarly interaction, particularly with better-funded and more technically advanced disciplines, is essential to digital humanities and perhaps even more so to digital classics. The international perspectives on these issues are especially valuable in an increasingly connected, institutionally and administratively diverse world. This book addresses the broad range of issues scholars and practitioners face in engaging with students, professionals and the public, in accessible and valuable chapters from authors of many backgrounds and areas of expertise, including language and linguistics, history, archaeology and architecture. This collection will be of interest to teachers, scientists, cultural heritage professionals, linguists and enthusiasts of history and antiquity.




Digital Histories


Book Description

Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action’, where its focus is shifting from the building of resources towards the making of new historical knowledge. This also involves novel challenges that digital methods pose to historical research, including awareness of the pitfalls and limitations of the digital tools and the necessity of new forms of digital source criticisms. Through its combination of empirical, conceptual and contextual studies, Digital Histories is a timely and pioneering contribution taking stock of how digital research currently advances historical scholarship.