Closing the Gap

A Digital Synopsis of the Mishnah and Tosefta

The aim of this project is to provide scholars and students of early rabbinic literature with digital tools to study and determine relationships between two central texts of rabbinic Judaism: the Mishnah (200 CE) and the Tosefta (250 CE) which share the same overall structure, the parallel organization, similar language and terminology and yet their relationship is tantalizingly problematic. The Synopsis Project will build upon and test computational methods for identifying “text reuse”; it will develop strategies and tools for presentation and visualization of overlapping texts which will provide access to the parallel and interrelated traditions of both texts.

A Digital Typology of Arabic Documents

The latest phase of the project Arabic Papyrology Database (APD). Its aim is to create digital diplomatic charts for structuring formulaic and layout features of Arabic documents.

A Literary History of Medicine Online

A Literary History of Medicine Online offers a digital edition of The ‘Uyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ written by famous Syrian physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘ah (d. 1270) along with its annotated English translation.

Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities

The main objective of Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities is to connect and promote all activities in the Digital Humanities taking place not only at the FU but also at the national and international level. By providing a social and communicative infrastructure for collaboration (co-working hours), developing interdisciplinary lab culture within the humanities (ADA.Labs) and bringing together all projects, teaching and training programs in the Digital Humanities at the FU it enhances and coordinates the transfer of project-based, personal expertise into a sustainable, interdisciplinary knowledge management.

Afrikanische Stimmen in islamischen Manuskripten aus Mali: Erschließung und Erforschung afrikanischer Sprachen in arabischer Schrift (Ajami)

This project is dedicated to research on manuscripts produced in African languages written in Arabic script (Ajami). The main focus of the study is the collection of rescued manuscripts form Timbuktu currently hosted in Bamako. The project aims at their historical and linguistic analyses, in-depth cataloguing, and establishment of a foundation for the interdisciplinary field of Ajami Studies.

Al-Furqan E-Database

The Al-Furqan Digital Library offers extensive access to a rich collection of Islamic manuscripts and scholarly works. It serves as a vital resource for researchers in the field of digital humanities by providing online access to rare texts, fostering the preservation of cultural heritage, and supporting academic study through searchable digital content.

al-Ṯurayyā Project

This project aims to reconstruct the geospatial characteristics of the early Islamic world by creating a digital gazetteer with includes over 2,000 toponyms, their descriptions from Arabic sources and technical information which is used for placing them on the map. The visualization is enriched by a geospatial model which plots routes and itineraries as well as networks of reachable places from selected centers, allowing to find paths between two or more locations.

Altägyptisches Wörterbuch

Altägyptisches Wörterbuch is a digital corpus of religious, juristic and administrative texts form ancient Egypt which were originally found in temples, tombs or on papyrus documents and which cover over 3000 years of Egyptian language history. The corpus together with a vast documentation of vocabulary and the ways it was used has been made available by open access and is updated regularly.

APSearch

APSearch is a cataloge of musical recordings from the MENA region dating from the beginning of the 20th century until present. It provides a sophisticated search engine which enables to filter the recordings by a variety of categories.

Arabic and Latin Corpus

The project is a digital collection of medieval Arabic-Latin translations to offer a deeper insight into the Arabic influence on Europe in the 10th to 14th centuries AD.

Arabic and Latin Glossary

The Arabic and Latin Glossary is a dictionary of medieval Arabic–Latin translations and corresponds to the project “Arabic and Latin Corpus” in terms of examining the Arabic influence on medieval Europe.

Arabic Literature Cosmopolitan

Arabic Literature Cosmopolitan and AnonymClassic jointly are the first ever comprehensive study of Kalila and Dimna, one of the most important text of premodern world literature which passed from Hinduism and Buddhism via Islam to Christianity. Its Arabic versions constitute a source of all further translations into European languages and are also the main focus of the project, which analyzes the transmission processes of the work from India to Europe with Arabic as cultural bridge.

Arabic Papyrology Database

The Arabic Papyrology database is a digital compilation of pre-modern Arabic manuscripts written between 7th and 16th century CE. It comprises a total of 13286 documents which can be search by their metadata and content.

Arbeitsstelle Kleine Fächer

This project focuses on “small subjects” or less known fields of study in German universities. Its main objective it to collect data about the current situation of small subjects in Germany as well as its documentation.

Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature by PATHs

The project aims to map and contextualize the distribution of Coptic literary texts across Egypt, focusing on their archaeological and manuscript traditions.

ARCHE

ARCHE is a digital archive designed specifically to preserve digital research data from the humanities created in or related to Austria. It also promotes the use of open access and open data policies.

ARCHES

The main objective of this project is the identification and cataloguing of Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts related to Bible exegesis and translation, known as the Firkovitch Collection. The series contains approximately 2700 manuscripts dating back to the Golden Age of Arabic lands (between 9th and 13th centuries), which provide an extraordinary window to the intellectual and religious life of the Jewish communities living in those areas in that time. The metadata of the manuscripts will be made accessible for further research.

Atlas of the Languages of Iran

The overall goal of the ALI research programme is to enable work toward a systematic understanding of the language situation in Iran. This initiative is guided by a set of interrelated themes which are: language distribution, linguistic and areal typology, language classification and language documentation. The output of the project can be found online in form of interactive maps and visualizations.

Audition Certificates Platform

The ACP transcribes audition certificates in Arabic manuscripts and links them to the digital reproductions as far as they are available. These certificates, found in manuscript books, provide rich historical data on authorized text transmissions, and the ACP's digital efforts aim to systematically explore libraries like Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Syrian National Library to create a searchable corpus, offering unique insights into Middle Eastern social, economic, and urban history, as well as biographical studies.

Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora

This project aims to significantly improve the accuracy of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts. It will develop a collation tool to automatically create large amounts of training data from existing digital texts and manuscript images without time-consuming human annotation of individual manuscripts.

Averroes Edition

The project’s main goal is to generate a trilingual critical edition of all commentaries by Ibn Rušd (Averroes) on Aristotle’s Physics, which are the synthesis of the late antique and Arabic reception of Greek philosophy. Next to the Arabic commentaries the edition will also contain their Latin and Hebrew translations.

Avestan Digital Archive

The ADA project seeks, on the one side, to find, to collect and to digitalize all the extant Avestan manuscripts. On the other hand, the ADA Project is developing a tool to provide all these manuscripts with indexes of the passages and to make them thus available on the web for researchers and for the general public. The electronic tool will allow an easy checking of all the manuscripts containing a concrete passage.

BABMED - Babylonische Medizin

BabMed represents the first comprehensive study of ancient Babylonian medical science since the decipherment of the cuneiform writing system. It aims to make Babylonian medical texts available not only for the specialist, but for the wider public as well by publishing them in form of thematic online corpora. Its second objective is to study medicine in the Babylonian Talmud, in order to explore comparisons with later medical traditions from the same region in Aramaic, another language of ancient Mesopotamia.

Bamberg Lexical Database for Contemporary Iranian Languages

The aim of this project is the sub-classification of Iranian languages which has proven to be a particularly recalcitrant problem in historical linguistics. BLDCIL will complement and extend existing scholarship by applying a novel phylogenetic methodology to this old problem. The research will be based on a compilation of standardized lexical data sets, together with sound files, from a representative set of Iranian languages, focusing initially on the West Iranian languages.

Barlaam and Josaphat in Arabic Literature and Culture

The focus of this project lies on Arabic manuscripts of Barlaam and Josaphat, an outstanding work of world literature, and the rich history of its transmission in Arabic sources. In the course of the project the manuscripts will be published online in an open-access research platform ediarum developed at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin, Germany). Along with the photocopies of the manuscripts, the platform will feature full transcriptions of the Arabic texts, an English translation of selected manuscripts as well as analytical metadata and bibliography. This will result in the creation of a comprehensive research tool on the history of Barlaam and Josaphat in Arabic literature.

Belegwörterbuch der sabäischen Sprache

This long-term project is dedicated to Sabaic language and aims to create a comprehensive dictionary based on a complete database of all known Sabaic inscriptions covering the period from 14th century BC to 6th century AD. The results of the project are available in an open-access online database which is fully searchable for Sabaic roots, words and forms.

Beta maṣāḥǝft Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea

The objective of this long-term project is to create a digital XML-based platform on Ethiopian and Eritrean manuscripts. It will provide its users not only with the textual content of the documents but also with all the available information on the documents themselves: authors, owners, scribes, provenance, various physical elements, colophons, notes, etc. The interoperability of the platform will allow search across all existing repositories. The incorporated manuscripts come both from western libraries as well as form Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Biblia Arabica: The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims

Biblia Arabica serves as a research consortium with focus on Arabic translations of Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek and Coptic Bible versions. It examines their stylistic and didactic features, vocabulary, scripts and strategies, as well as the mutual religious and cultural influences between the different religious communities, which were reinforced by the translation movements. The project attempts to set methodological standards on this field of study, charts countless manuscripts from across the globe and analyzes different method of translation form the various source languages.

Bibliotheca Arabica

This project is dedicated to research on Arabic literatures dating from 1150 to 1850, a period perceived as a steady cultural decline of the region. The project counters this narrative by focusing on manuscripts that were produced and read throughout this time. Next to publication of 16 volumes and numerous articles and working papers, the project will provide a bio-bibliographical research platform that integrates digitized catalogue data and collections of manuscript notes, as well as a curated compilation of bio-bibliographical sources and Linked Data collections.

Borno and Old Kanembu Islamic Manuscripts

This digital collection provides access to one of the earliest written sub-Saharan languages in manuscript form - Old Kanembu written in Arabic script was a language of Qur’anic interpretation in the ancient Borno Sultanate. The digitalized corpus contains more than 5000 folios of Old Kanembu Islamic manuscripts from Nigeria, Niger and Republic of Chad and is an outcome of three research projects conducted in SOAS University of London and University Hamburg.

Change Projekt - Wandel@FU-Bib

The Change Project’s objective was to reorganize and optimize library infrastructure at FU Berlin. Within the two years of its activity the project’s team worked at improving connection and communication between university libraries and CeDiS (Centre for Digital Systems), simplifying structures, enhancing user orientation and service quality as well as increasing general efficiency and ability to manage future challenges.

CLARIAH-DE

CLARIAH-DE is the merger of the two research infrastructure networks CLARIN-D and DARIAH-DE. Over a period of two years, the project will merge the two established research infrastructures. In this way, researchers from the Humanities and cultural sciences will be able to work with complex digital tools and special data sets in a much easier manner.

CLARIN - European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology

CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a pan-European infrastructure which provides access to digital language data and advanced tools to discover, annotate, analyze or combine this data via a network of European repositories. The infrastructure mainly serves for purposes of social sciences and humanities.

CLARIN-D - European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology

CLARIN-D is a research-oriented infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences which supports researchers with accessing, preparing and analyzing of research data based on all language-related resources. It offers information on a wide range of topics, including teaching material, help on data management plans and other, discipline-specific support and makes available tools for Humanities, Cultural and Social Sciences scholars to analyze their research data in different ways. It is a German center of a pan-European research infrastructure CLARIN.

Colophons in Sumerian and Akkadian Literary Manuscripts from 3rd and 2nd Millennium BCE Mesopotamia

The focus of this project are colophons of Sumerian and Akkadian manuscripts dating back to 3rd and 2nd millennium BC, which until now have been neglected in manuscript studies. The objective is to create a database containing a catalogue of respective manuscripts and an edition of the extant colophons. It should serve as solid base for the study of scribal practices in an ancient Mesopotamia and the relevance of colophons in its cultural history.

Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a’s “History of the Physicians”

This project’s objective is to digitally examine the social encounters of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars in the Abbasid Near East (750–1258) engaged in exchange of medical knowledge as described by Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a (d. 1270), a Muslim physician from Syria in his history of medicine. The project will digitally record these interactions and use network analysis in order to identify the persons most frequently involved in scholar exchange and compare the results with representations from other sources.

Compilation and critical edition of pre-19th century Kurmanji Kurdish

The main purpose of this project is to lay a foundation for serious academic research on the history of Kurdish, which until now is severely hampered due to the lack of written attestation prior to the 15th century. The project will thus compile a selection of 10 Kurdish texts from prior to 1800, transliterated in a standardized format and supplied with English translations and an authoritative critical apparatus. The texts will also be made fully accessible as a digital corpus, accompanied by a concordance, and the resulting two volumes will be published on the open-access portal of the University of Bamberg.

Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA)

This project is a partnership of various European research institutions to build a shared resource of high-quality data, tools and knowledge to aid new approaches to studying literature in the digital age. It aims to create an infrastructure which will align the diverse resources of Europe’s multilingual and interconnected literary heritage with each other, with the tools needed to interrogate them, and with a widened base of users.

Coptic OCR

The aim of this project is to improve the quality and accessibility of OCR software for Coptic texts and their different fonds using Machine Learning technologies.

Coranica

The focus of Coranica Project is to understand the early development and canonization of the Qur’an by giving priority to the empirical approach (analyses of material evidence like manuscripts), rather than to the data of the Arabo-Islamic tradition. The project consists of two components: the first, “Manuscripta et testimonia coranica,” aims at producing catalogued inventories and studies of the earliest manuscripts of the Qur’an. The second part, Glossarium Coranicum, will provide focused analysis and documentation on the languages (spoken and written) and religions that were practiced in Arabia at the time of Muhammad, and on their impact on the Qur’anic lexicon.

Corpus Avesticum Berolinense

The CAB project represents the first attempt to edit the entire Avestan Zoroastrian textual corpus within its ritual context, and to produce and offer both printed and digital editions of the texts. It will also develop a set of tools for an assisted reading of these texts, including translations, grammatical and semantic analysis of words, etc., which will be accessible also for non-specialist readers. Amongst these tools, the project will offer a digital version of the standard dictionary of the Avestan language (Bartholomae’s Altiranisches Woerterbuch).

Corpus Coranicum

Corpus Coranicum develops a catalogue of early Qur’anic manuscripts and texts of the Islamic scholarly tradition, which are all published online (open access) by using TEI standards. It offers not only transcriptions of the manuscripts in original languages and their German translations, but also images of originals, variant readings and commentaries explaining their literary, cultural and historical context. The project focuses on the systematic documentation of sources related to the Qur’an with the objective to reconstruct the development of the first Muslim community as the interaction between the Prophet and the first addressees in Mecca and Medina.

Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari

The CMCL project digitally reconstructs manuscripts, critically edits Coptic texts, and maintains a comprehensive electronic database encompassing authors, works, manuscripts, electronic editions, computational grammar, and a bibliography in Egyptology, Coptology, and Christian Orient.

Corpus der arabischen und syrischen Gnomologien

The corpus represents an assemblage of proverbs, aphorisms, and sagacious declarations sourced from the literary traditions of Arabic and Syriac. Additionally, it encompasses Greek texts, facilitating the examination of knowledge transmission across these three distinct cultural spheres.

Corpus Masoreticum

The long-term project Corups Masoreticum is dedicated to the Masorah of the Hebrew Bible – a corpus of annotations regarding rules of orthography, syntax, vocalization, cantillation etc. of the Biblical Text. This project is the first ever scientific engagement with the Western European (Ashkenazic) Masorah tradition between the 11th and 13th centuries. The philological work is integrated into a digital work environment BIMA, which was develop for the need of the project, and will result in an openly accessible digital edition of Ashkenazic Masorah.

Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae

This long-term project is dedicated to the transcription and critical editing of nineteenth-century sources of Ottoman music written in Hampartsum and staff notations, as well as the accompanying song texts. The end results of the project will be made available through an online platform which will provide access to both music and text editions, as well as the source catalogue, which is a comprehensive database of printed, manuscript, and online sources. The materials of the edited corpus represent the multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment of the region and period.

Corpus of Arabic Legal Documents

CALD is a research tool developed for the study of Arabic legal documents from the 7th to 16th centuries C.E. It provides access to over 3,000 historical documents, facilitating the study of Islamic law. The platform offers a sample of these documents along with analytical tools, and users can create accounts to access images and resources.

Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions

The CSAI (Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions) is a significant collection of over 15,000 epigraphic inscriptions documenting South Arabian culture from the late 2nd millennium BC to the 6th century AD.

CorpusBuilder

The objective of this project is to develop a robust and user-friendly OCR pipeline for Islamic texts.

Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present

PalREAD is a project dedicated to Palestinian literature from 1948 to the present which aims to find new ways to account for the literary production of a displaced population. It elaborates a new methodology of literary analysis that challenges and lies outside conventional conceptions of the nation-state and adopts an interdisciplinary and transmedial approach that embeds literary production in a wider cultural web of intersecting media and genres. The output of the project will be made accessible in the form of an online platform.

Critical Edition of Ibn Bāğğa’s Commentary on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione

This project focuses on Ibn Bāğğa’s Commentary on Aristotle’s “De generatione et corruption” which, eclipsed by the subsequent commentaries of Averroes, received scant attention, even though the importance of Ibn Bāğğa’s influence on the thought of the latter is undeniable. The objective of the project is a critical edition of Ibn Bāğğa’s commentaries, who not only follows Aristotle but also presents different examples and develops ideas of his own.

Critical Edition of Ibn Bāǧǧa’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics

Ibn Bāǧǧa’s commentaries provide an exposition of the content of Aristotle’s “Physics,” which is partly incomplete. They also had a decisive impact on Averroes’s commentaries on the same work. The project’s objective is a critical edition of Ibn Bāǧǧa’s commentaries, the study of their genesis and structure as well as their first ever presentation in form of a complete and reliable text.

Critical Edition of the Fragmentary Latin Translation of Averroes’s Commentary on De Partibus Animalium and De Generatione Animalium

The project aims at proving inside in Averroes’s lost commentary on Aristotle’s De partibus animalium and De generatione animalium by editing its Latin translation together with a study of work’s transmission into Hebrew.

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

The main goal of this project it to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform inscriptions dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. It already catalogued 320,00 of approximately more than 500,000 artefacts kept in public and private collections.

Datenbankgestützte Erfassung, Erforschung und digitale Präsentation der Familienbibliothek Refaiya

This project is dedicated to digital presentation, cataloguing, and research on the private Arabic-Islamic library of the Damascene Rifā‘ī family. The Refaiya library contains 488 carefully preserved volumes, which can be seen as an archive of a traditional Islamic culture of scholarship, knowledge, and books handed down over several centuries—until its purchase by Prussian Consul and Arabist Johann Gottfried Wetzstein in the 19th century. A trilingual database (English, German, and Arabic) will make the manuscripts accessible internationally, including in the Islamic world.

Datenrepositorium Manuskriptkulturen

This project was dedicated to the systematic securing and long-term use of all research data relevant for SFB (Sonderforschungsbereich for Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe). As result a centralized data repository was created for all the sub-projects of SBF synchronizing them with the administration and freeing them of the tasks of securing data and of developing specific tools. Next to the collection of all the data of SFB the created infrastructure helps to optimize manuscript research by making all manuscripts available in one place, offering the possibility to annotate documents, to write glossaries and to make results available to the public as well as by supporting the graduate college on using e-learning.

Demarginalizing Medieval Africa: Images, Texts, and Identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia

The research object of the ITIESE project are manuscripts belonging to the literary tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which until now unjustly remain at the periphery of academic interest. The project’s intention is to shed new light on the cultural heritage of Ethiopian Empire by examining manuscripts illuminations made by medieval Ethiopian artists with focus on the cultural, religious and socio-political significance of their activities. The project will furthermore set up a platform for exchange between scholars working on the history of manuscripts illumination.

Der Bibeltext der Handschriften mit babylonisch-jemenitischer Punktation: Erfassung der Textvarianten

This project is dedicated to the complete collection and computerization of textual variants of the Biblical manuscripts of the Babylonian and Yemenite tradition. The variants will be compered with other ancient textual witnesses and classified in their historical context. The analyses of the hitherto unexplored material will open a new perspective for the reconstruction of the biblical text history.

Dhimmis and Muslims - Analysing Multi-Religious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World

This project is dedicated to the study of religious diversity in medieval Muslim cities. The main purpose is to create a comprehensive database containing geographical information about religious communities compiled from various medieval sources and to make the data accessible via interactive visualization as well as a pilot web-based geo-temporal multi-view system.

Die Großbotschaften Damian Hugo von Virmonts und Ibrahim Paschas (1719/20)

The aim of this project is the edition of all Habsburg and Ottoman sources documenting the diplomatic mission of Damian Hugo of Virmont and Ibrahim Pasha 1719/20, which are letters reports, travelogues, invoices, pictures, maps, artifacts, leaflets, pamphlets and newspapers. Sources written in Ottoman Turkish are translated into English and the editing work is based on a dynamic indexing process, according to which sources and metadata are put online even before the historical-critical editing is fully completed.

Die Schreiben Selims II. an Maximilian II. und Mustafa Paşa (1566–1574)

The purpose if this project was to edit documents from the MA thesis “Die Schreiben Selims II. aus dem Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv zu Wien und die habsburgisch-osmanischen Beziehungen zwischen 1566 und 1574,” Vienna 2020, written by Halit Temiz and supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Claudia Römer. They were converted into TEI-XML within the framework of the project Digital Edition of Sources on Habsburg-Ottoman Diplomacy 1500-1918 (QhoD), including all apparatus, and are available here under free license as an XML corpus.

Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions

DASI seeks to gather all known pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphic material into a comprehensive online database, with the aim to make available to specialists and to the broader public a wide array of documents often underestimated because of their difficulty of access.

Digital Corpus for Greco-Arabic Studies

The Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies was created in the course of a collaborative project at Harvard and Tufts University and contains ca. 230 texts, three fifths of which are Greek originals and the rest are Arabic translations. In addition, the platform offers a list of authors and works included in the corpus that can be filtered by language, subject and text type and a search interface to search for Arabic or Greek words and phrases.

Digital Guide to Theatre of the Middle East

The project provides essential information on the most significant plays/performances written and performed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and among their diasporas since 2000. The goal is to recognize and display the breadth and diversity of theatrical visions, creations, and collaborations of MENA theatre artists in an accessible and sustained manner to academics and theater practitioners and producers.

Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH)

DARIAH is a pan-European research infrastructure with 20 Members, 1 Observer and several Cooperating Partners in six non-member countries. It aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the arts and humanities. DARIAH is a network of people, expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and technologies from its member countries. It develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyze and interpret digital resources.

Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-DE)

DARIAH-DE is a member of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities. It supports research in the humanities and cultural studies that work with digital methods and procedures with a research infrastructure consisting of four pillars: teaching, research, research data and technical components.

Digital Sirah Project

This project combines traditional methods of textual discovery and machine learning technologies with the goal of developing algorithms that are capable to locate reuse of Sirah (Biography) of the Prophet Muhammad, written by Muhammad b. Ishaq (d. 150/767) in a 1.5 billion word corpus of classical Arabic texts.

Digitale Gesamtedition und Übersetzung des koptisch-sahidischen Alten Testaments

In this long-term project, the objective is to digitally reconstruct the Coptic Old Testament composed in an extinct Coptic dialect, Sahidic. The vast majority of manuscripts of this text are scattered across institutions in Europe and North America, which until now made a complete edition impossible. Equipped with new technologies of digital scholarship, the project will aim at overcoming this challenge by recreating the Coptic Old Testament in the form of an online database, which will contain photos and descriptions of catalogued manuscripts or their fragments, as well as English, German, and Arabic translations. It will also develop a system of digital tools for research on Coptic literature.

Digitalisierungsprojekt Translatio

Documentation of Endangered Languages / Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen

The DoBeS program was initiated in 2000 by the Volkswagen Foundation in order to document languages that are potentially in danger of becoming extinct within a few years' time. It consisted of one archiving team and several documentation teams recording language data through fieldwork. The teams carried out 67 documentation projects collecting audio and video data in a close cooperation with the speech communities. The data are described with a set of standardized metadata categories and digitally archived according to open standards and made accessible. In addition, the archive ensures the long-term persistency of the digital material.

Documentation of Gorani, an endangered language of West Iran

This project aims at documenting the endangered language and cultural practices of the Gorani speech community in western Iran. It will provide a collection of film recordings, highlighting the importance of musical performances in all areas of Gorani folklore and culture, annotated collections of religious texts, traditional folklore, oral narratives (mainly from recent history), and everyday speech, descriptive grammatical sketch of the Gawraju’i variety of Gorani and an electronic lexicon with multimedia applications.

Doha Historical Dictionary (معجم الدوحة التأريخي للغة العربية)

This project aims to create a historical dictionary of Arabic language. The entries will follow changes in usage and meaning of each word from its first documented record until approximately 200 years AH / 820 AD (first phase of the project).

Early Prints of Yemeni Works

The EPYW project aims to geographically visualize the dissemination of early printed Yemeni works, offering an interactive platform for exploring this literary heritage. Users can search the database by author, editor, and publication year, accessing detailed metadata that includes author names, editor names, publishers, and publishing dates. Additionally, the project features advanced place-based analytics, enabling users to analyze documented works geographically and sort data by individuals, years, or publishers, providing valuable insights into the historical and cultural landscape of Yemeni print culture.

Edition des Gesamtwerkes von Ibn Nubātah al-Miṣrī

Against the concept of the decline of Islamic cultures after the 11th century it becomes apparent that this period witnessed vast literal and cultural developments. One of these is a major impact of the most important poet of Mamluk era, Ibn Nubātah, on the Arabic literature for the centuries after him. The aim of this project is a complete digital edition of his diwan and twelve other works, most of with are available only in bad prints. Due to many revisions and rewritings made by the author the editing of his works is a great challenge. In order to represent his poetry correctly the edition will contain may versions of the poems enabling their comparison.

eScriptorium

This project provides digital recognition of handwritten documents using machine learning techniques. It offers an integrated set of tools to transcribe, annotate, translate and publish historical documents written in Arabic script.

Ethio-SPaRe: Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia. Salvation, Preservation, Research

The Ethio-SPaRe project focused on preserving and analyzing manuscripts in Ethiopian churches and monasteries, particularly in the Tigray region. With a mission to safeguard Ethiopia's rich Christian heritage, the project aimed to identify, protect, digitize, and catalog manuscripts, creating searchable databases and virtual libraries while conducting extensive research into Ethiopian literature and oral traditions. The urgency stemmed from the imminent extinction of a substantial part of this unique cultural heritage.

European Lexicographic Infrastructure

ELEXIS is a cooperation project carried out by 17 European partner institutions that aims to develop an infrastructure which will foster cooperation and knowledge exchange between different research communities in lexicography in order to bridge the gap between lesser-resourced languages and those for which advanced experience in e-lexicography exists. ELEXIS will introduce common standards of data management for lexicographic resources and dictionary databases and develop tools and infrastructure which will enhance and harmonize cooperation between European institutions, publishers, universities and communities have been developing dictionaries and/or dictionary data.

FDNext

In this project six universities in Berlin and Brandenburg cooperate and exchange their expertise to optimize and improve Research Data Management (RDM) systems in their institutions. The focus of the project lies on the following aspects: 1) establishment of a contact point for legal questions concerning RDM (First-Level-Support), 2) fostering the qualifications of researchers by extending the offer on RDM training, 3) development of subject-specific RDM strategies and project-based RDM policies, 4) analyses and establishment of suitable services and central facilities as well as 5) enhancing the interoperability with external infrastructures and international cooperation.

From Translation to Creation: Changes in Ethiopic Style and Lexicon from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

The TraCes meticulously analyzed lexical, morphological, and stylistic features in Ethiopic texts, creating a groundbreaking digital corpus. The project's highlight is a comprehensive digital lexicon of the Gəʿəz language, departing from traditional dictionaries, providing complete lemmas, full translations, and contextual insights, resulting in the first-ever thesaurus for Gəʿəz.

GenderVarianten — Revisionen von Genderkonstruktionen in Textüberlieferungen

The project combines New Testament textual criticism, analyses of the reception of gender constructions, information science research, and systematic-ethical investigations. The central aim of the project is to analyze how digitally supported research can provide interdisciplinary gender studies with new opportunities for analyzing the transmission of texts and uncovering associated understandings of gender.

Genesis Rabbah Loanwords

This project investigates the predominantly Greek borrowed vocabulary in the Midrash Genesis Rabbah, the earliest rabbinic commentary on the Book of Genesis written in Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic. It aims to compile a dictionary in TEI format and the annotation of the loanwords in the corpus for the investigation of issues pertaining to sociolinguistics as well as corpus linguistics.

Glossarion

This project’s objective is to develop an integrative database for the results of the research project “Verses and Sayings” (Verse und Sprüche).

Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum

Glossarium Græco-Arabicum serves as a database which makes available the files of a lexical project, intended to open up the lexicon of the medieval Arabic translations from the Greek in all the major disciplines of philosophy and the sciences. It provides information on vocabulary and syntax of Classical and Middle Arabic and Greek, on the development of scientific and technical vocabulary and on lexical consequences of the translation movement form Greek to Arabic. The sources of the projects are mainly complied form earlier glossaries, printed editions and manuscripts.

Grasping the World in Ottoman Istanbul: Visual Negotiation and Reading in Practices in Geographic Literature from the Sixteenth Century

This project examines how geographical literature in sixteenth-century Istanbul was impacted by the vast cultural and political expiation of the Ottoman Empire in that time. As the city became a new center for scholarship and art, the elites began circulating Arabic and Persian geographical manuscripts. The project asks how this exchange was received by artists and cartographers who in turn negotiated and transformed geographic knowledge through images. Besides that, the project will also build a comprehensive online database of geographic manuscripts and their illustrations.

Gumar Corpus

The aim of the GUMAR project is to automatically annotate a 100M-word Gulf Arabic corpus and develop gold standard data annotations for 200,000 words from eight novels, improving tools for Gulf Arabic automatic analysis.

Handschriftenportal

This collaborative project carried out by four German libraries (see parent projects) will develop an online platform to provide metadata, descriptive information and images of all manuscripts held at German institutions, as well as a user-friendly workspace for manuscript research. It will enable researchers to access and work on data presented in a standardized and coherent way from one central access point.

Hannah Arendt Digital

The objective of this long-term project is a first ever complete hybrid (print and online) edition of all Arendt’s published and unpublished works in their original languages. The digital edition offers commentaries and additional information about each text in the corpus as well as diverse search options. The project enables a new approach to the development of stile and thought of the author and her practice of writing between and across languages and audiences.

Hethitologie Portal Mainz

This concluded project is an infrastructure for digital publication of cuneiform documents. Its aim is to modernize and foster the development of hittitological research by building an openly accessible database for its founding and elaborating new standardized way of their documentation. Currently the HPM infrastructure hosts data of many external researchers and projects form the field of Hittitology.

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library

HMML is an enterprise of saving and cataloguing manuscripts from all across the globe. It’s history reaches back to the 1960s when first repository of manuscripts’ photographs in form of microfilms was initiated at the Saint John’s University. Nowadays HMML archives approximately 300,000 manuscripts containing more than 70 languages. In 2015 the library launched its online platform of digitalized manuscripts to make them available for public and further research.

Historia de los Autores y Transmisores Andalusíes

The project focus lies in the intellectual production of al-Andalus. It aims to compile a bio-bibliographical database of over 5,000 Andalusian scholars, detailing their works and contributions in chronological order.

Historical Middle East Data Alliance

An informal alliance for exchanging research data related to the historical Middle East.

HUNAYNNET

This project is a first ever attempt to compile a digital trilingual and linguistically annotated parallel corpus of Greek classical scientific and philosophical literature and the Syriac and Arabic translations thereof. Besides an online lexicography the database is enhanced by a linguistic corpus management system providing advanced search tools which help to compare and analyze the texts in all three languages.

Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine

The Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project seeks to collect and make freely accessible all of the previously published inscriptions (and their English translations) of Israel/Palestine from the Persian period through the Islamic conquest (ca. 500 BCE – 640 CE).

Irankoran

This project is dedicated to the study of early Qur’anic manuscripts from Iran with the central question of which kind of deviations in the text of the Quran, as it was fixed in the 10th century, are historically verifiable. The project will develop an online catalogue of all Qur’anic manuscripts held in the National Museum of Iran and other collections, create transliterations of Arabic text from selected pages and date the parchment with radiocarbon measurement. All these steps will be followed by analysis of the selected texts in order to verify the deviation from the canonical readings.

Islam in the Horn of Africa: A comparative Literary Approach

The project focuses on the Islamic culture of the Horn of Africa, exploring the region's rich but under-researched literary heritage. It applies digital humanities approaches to catalog, digitize, and analyze manuscripts written in Arabic and local languages using Arabic script. The project has created a comprehensive database that documents over 4,000 texts, shedding light on the region's Islamic traditions and intellectual history while enhancing the preservation of its written heritage​.

Islamic Painted Page

Islamic Painted Page is an online database of Islamicate arts of the book, which originated from a personal project of Stephen Serpell and now turned to major international recourse with over 42,000 references to paintings, illuminations and bindings from over 270 collections around the globe. Its functions are twofold: firstly, it enables users to locate and compare works worldwide using a single database, displaying images wherever possible; and secondly, it signposts users onward to more authoritative sources, with hotlinks direct to the specific image pages of collection websites where available, and page-specific references for printed publications. The database is currently hosted by the University Hamburg.

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative

ISMI is a catalogue that includes an object-relational database storing information on the rational scienes of scientific, philosophical and theological traditions of Islam before 1900 CE. The database aims to provide access to Islamicate authors, their works, and extant manuscript witnesses of mathematical sciences

Isnalyser

For scholars studying ḥadīth texts, drawing an isnād tree with more than 40 transmitters is a tedious task, and finding the right medium to display it fully can even prove to be impossible. isnalyser is a simple program for the automation of drawing isnād trees and for their customizable display in handy formats.

Jara'id: A Chronology of Arabic Periodicals (1800-1929)

The “Jara’id” project seeks to establish a comprehensive digital research tool for identifying and cataloging 19th-century Arabic periodicals, facilitating access to crucial historical publications. By indexing key details such as publication dates, locations, languages, and contributors, it provides scholars with a centralized resource for exploring Arabic intellectual and cultural history.

Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World

The aim of the project is to study Jewish books, their makers and their readers in the medieval eastern Mediterranean. JBC draws on a large corpus of manuscripts produced in Egypt and the Near East in the ninth to thirteenth centuries and enrols multidisciplinary methods of codicology, palaeography and general book history to study books as objects and as essential actors in the transmission of texts, practices and ideas.

Kalila and Dimna – AnonymClassic

AnonymClassic is the first ever comprehensive study of Kalila and Dimna, one of the most important text of premodern world literature which passed from Hinduism and Buddhism via Islam to Christianity. Its Arabic versions constitute a source of all further translations into European languages and are also the main focus of the project, which analyzes the transmission processes of the work from India to Europe with Arabic as cultural bridge.

Kallimachos

Kallimachos is a Digital Humanities center at the University of Würzburg. It was developed via a project by the same name funded between 2014 and 2019. The center supports humanities scholars in applying digital methods in their research by providing technical and social infrastructure, software, and prototypical workflows. The center also establishes an integral structure for research data management.

Keywords for the Study of the Arabic Literary and Manuscript Tradition

KALiMaT is the first bilingual, open-access Arabic-English online living handbook of short articles on historical terms from the pre-modern and early modern literary tradition. Each article addresses a lemma, providing analysis and contextualization that makes the historical term accessible. With its nuanced approach focused on the analysis of concepts from the Arabic tradition and the critical examination of Western and modern literary categories, as well as with its bilingual publication strategy in both English and Arabic, KALiMaT contributes to the decolonization of knowledge. The project will be hosted on the Open Encyclopedia System infrastructure offered by Freie Universität Berlin.

KIMA

The project aims to develop an open-access digital gazetteer for place names in Hebrew script, creating a comprehensive and interoperable database of historical toponyms. By providing a stable digital reference accessible via its website and API, Kima facilitates scholarly research and integration with tools like the Pelagios annotation and mapping environment Recogito.

Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book

KITAB is a platform which enables exploration of Arabic texts in digital form. It also provides a digital toolbox and a forum for discussions about Arabic literature. The main research focus of the project lies in the question of how authors copied from previous works. The research is conducted on a corpus of texts created for the needs of the project and powered by technologies at the cutting edge of computer science. All documentation is openly accessible on GitHub.

KOHD Coptica

The KOHD Coptica project, part of the Cataloging of Oriental Manuscripts in Germany initiative, catalogs and digitizes Coptic manuscripts in the Berlin Papyrus Collection. The ongoing database development facilitates efficient searches and standardized presentations of metadata, with records gradually released as cataloging and digitization progress.

KOHD Digital

KOHD Digital is a databank of KODH (Die Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland) – a research project that aims at systematizing not yet cataloged manuscripts from various German libraries. Previously all texts were published in printed catalogues but since 2016 they appear mostly online in KHOD Digital databank.

KompetenzwerkD

KompetenzwerkD is a research center for the Digital Humanities for various extramural research institutes in Saxony (see the project’s website). The objectives is to enhance the cooperation and exchange between the local institutes, implementation of Open Data Policy promotion and further development of digital methods in humanistic research.

Linguistic dynamics in the Greater Tunis Area: a corpus-based approach (TUNICO)

The focus of this project lies on the Arabic dialect spoken in the Tunisian capital. It investigates the linguistic dynamics caused by recent demographic changes in the metropolitan area of Tunis and its intention is to gather data through field recordings made with young speakers who were born in Tunis but descended from parents who arrived to the capital from other regions. Based on this data two digital language resources were created: a corpus of unmonitored speech that contains both conversations and narratives and a dictionary based on this corpus and on previously published resources.

Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt

The Elephantine Manuscripts Project employs cutting-edge digital methodologies, integrating disciplines like digital humanities, physics, and mathematics. A central element is the development of an open-access online research database, housing 80% previously unpublished manuscripts in ten different languages and scripts. The database provides unprecedented insights into the medical, religious, legal, administrative, and literary aspects of Elephantine's history spanning 4000 years.

Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Language

Combining the newest developments in machine learning with statistical and neural machine translation technologies, this project formulates, tests and evaluates methodologies to translate and analyze the contents of some 67,000 highly standardized administrative documents from southern Mesopotamia. All outcomes of the project, the methodologies, the translations and the data extracted from them, will be offered to the public in open access.

MAJLIS. The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World

This project is dedicated to the hitherto under-researched Judaeo-Arabic literature from the period between the 9th and the 11th century. The overall aim is to explore how the adoption of Arabic language and Arabic intellectual tradition influenced the Jewish literary creativity in this period. The project will proceed by applying state-of-the-art digital tools to analyze manuscripts, trace changes in the Jewish literature, identify the dominant scholars and to compare the Judaeo-Arabic literature with non-Jewish literary traditions of the time.

Mamluk Bibliography Online

The Mamluk Bibliography Online is a digital humanities resource offering a comprehensive, searchable database of bibliographic records on Mamluk studies. Divided into primary and secondary resources, it allows users to search by authors or subjects, streamlining access to scholarly materials for research on Mamluk history and culture.

Maparabia

The objective of the project is to produce a set of tools with a common aim: to model territorial and cultural dynamics by cross-referencing the various available sources. These analyses yield an updated regional history from the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE to the 7th cent. CE.

Memory Spaces: Mapping Oral History in Mosul

The project aims to establish an online accessible digital platform where former and current residents of the Iraqi city of Mosul can contribute their personal and individual memories of their hometown. These memories can be inserted in the form of stories, images, and audio recordings, all placed on a digital and visually appealing map of Mosul and its surroundings (prior to 2014). After editorial processing and approval by a dedicated editorial team, these contributions will be accessible worldwide.

Mesopotamian Royal Inscriptions

In this sub-project of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), the focus lies on the digitization of royal and monumental texts, which despite representing a small share of the overall CDLI catalogue (20,000 of 350 000 texts) assume a disproportionately large role in history, literature, and linguistics in the several sub-fields of cuneiform studies.

Mesopotamian Seals

This sub-project of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) focuses explicitly on inscriptions on the Mesopotamian stamp and cylinder seals for which, despite their substantial role in the development of writing, the online resources are still difficult to be found. This project is offered to bring attention to the admittedly limited text annotation files of the CDLI as one of several avenues of research available in this field.

Methoden der Bildverarbeitung zur Bestimmung von visuellen Manuskript- und Zeichenmerkmalen

This project is intended to support the research program of the SFB (Sonderforschungsbereich for Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe) by piloting and further development of the Advanced Manuscript Analysis Portal (AMAP), a web-based platform offering self-usable toolbox for humanists and facilitating communication between experts, as well as by development of innovative image processing methods.

Methoden der Manuskriptanalyse zur Wiedergewinnung verlorener Schrift

This project supports the research program of the SFB (Sonderforschungsbereich for Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe) by making available and further development of modern technologies that help to recover scripts that are not longer readable for the human eye due to organic deterioration or conscious interventions.

Middle East Librarians Association

MELA is an association of Middle East library specialists. Its mission is to facilitate communication and encourage cooperation among its members and Middle East libraries. It aims at improving area librarianship through the development of standards for the profession and education of Middle East librarians. It also compiles and disseminates information concerning Middle East libraries through various meeting and publications.

Mouse & Manuscript

The aim of the 'Mouse & Manuscript' project is to enhance teaching on codicology and Oriental manuscripts by utilizing digital tools to make Leiden University's manuscript collections more accessible. The project provides interactive lessons, leveraging digital humanities technology, such as an IIIF viewer, to offer detailed, zoomable access to manuscripts, while integrating questions and assignments to engage students and support further scholarly research.

Moving frontiers

This project aims to create a dynamic reconstruction of historical events that revolved around the conflict between Tang China and the Arab Caliphate around 750, ultimately establishing a balance of power between the two empires in Central Asia. The methodology employed is multidisciplinary, combining historical and archaeological data related to frontier dynamics and mobility. These data will be integrated into theoretical network analysis models and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Multi-Arabic Dialect Applications and Resources

The project aimed at improving dialectal Arabic processing by developing resources for Arabic dialect modeling, including a 25-city multi-dialect lexicon and parallel corpus, as well as creating machine translation systems between dialects, English, and Standard Arabic, and advancing dialect identification systems capable of operating at different levels of granularity.

Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts

Multi-CAST is a collection of annotated texts from a typologically diverse selection of 15 languages including endangered ones. The corpus is freely accessible via an online platform which provides multiple levels of parallel annotations, time-aligned with audio recordings, chiefly monologic, natural narrative texts from 15 languages, encompassing roughly 25,000 clause units available in multiple file formats, including as EAF files for the linguistic annotation software ELAN, as XML and TSV files, and via the multicastR package for R.

New Languages for NLP

The practical aim of this project is to add so-called under-represented or low-resource languages to the library of spaCy. Ultimately, the more general goal consists in increasing the diversity of languages and trained models to help natural language processing reflect the linguistic diversity of our world.

Nimrud NW Palace

This project is a collaboration between Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and a German researcher Klaudia Englund and is dedicated to the digital preservation of the heritage of the Nimrud palace, which suffered severe damage at the hands of ISIS. The main goal of the project lies in preparing for display the image and text files that the researcher gathered in the course of her work on the Northwest Palace and the over 600 relief slabs mounted along the walls of the building’s main rooms.

NoMansLand: Nomads’ Manuscripts Landscape

The focus of this projects lies on Iranian and Central Asian societies in the period between the 13th and 15th century which witnessed nomadic conquest after the rise of Chinggis Khan. The process of transculturation and interaction between the sedentary Muslim conquered and nomadic conqueror is documented in largely unstudied manuscripts from that period, which will be explored and analyzed in the course of this project. The technical side of the project will be responsible for developing and implementing of an independent Analytical Database of Islamic Manuscripts which will serve both as a digital repository of manuscripts and an analytical tool that will allow users to do wider research on Islamic and Eurasian studies.

Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia

The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia aims to help transform our knowledge of the history, languages and cultures of ancient Arabia by creating a digital corpus of all known Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in North and Central Arabia, and elsewhere.

Onomasticon Arabicum

Onomasticon Arabicum (OA) is an Arabic biographical database created in the course of a long-living project reaching back to the 1960s. It contains more than 27000 entries about scholars and celebrities from the first Muslim millenary. Its searching tools are designed to allow the user separate interrogation on any of the different elements of the Arabo-Muslim names, dates and places, reconstructing the identity of a person, trace ways of knowledge transmission and frame historical contexts.

Open Arabic Periodical Editions: A framework for bootstrapped digital scholarly editions outside the global north

Corpus of TEI/XML editions of Arabic periodicals, a static webview, and a framework of workflows for digital scholarly editions following the principles of minimal computing to address the affordances of the digital for cultural artefacts from the Global South

Open Encyclopedia System

OES is a standardized publishing platform for humanities and social sciences. Contrary to existing academic encyclopedias the OES taps into the full potential of e-publishing by adding new solutions to the already available options: it offers flexible workflows, configurable participation models, various options for customizing the peer review process and features that facilitate the engagement and management of a community.

Open Islamicate Texts Initiative

Open ITI is a multi-institutional project which aims to construct the first machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts in Arabic, Persian and other languages of the Islamic world. This new textual infrastructure will enhance the implementation of new forms of macro textual and digital scholarship in the inter-related fields of Islamic, Persian, and Arabic Studies

Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project

This project is led by an interdisciplinary team of humanities, computer science, and digital humanities co-principal investigators with the scope to challenge the technical and organizational barriers that historically have stymied the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production for Islamicate Studies. Its primary goal is to achieve approximately 97% character accuracy rates (CARs) for OCR on the most used Persian and Arabic print typefaces.

OpenITI_NgramReader

The NgramReader analyzes and visualizes the chronological occurrence of words and phrases based on the OpenITI corpus data. It enables the combination of various morphological forms and the exploration of object classes.

Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus

Oracc emerged from the CDLI project. It is a is a collaborative effort to develop a complete multilingual corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research.

Orient-Digital

Orient-Digital is a union catalogue and a portal for oriental manuscripts kept in Germany. It will contain the metadata of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts from more than 25 cooperating institutions and will provide links to the digitized manuscripts that are available online.

Oxford Cambridge Islamic Manuscript Catalogue Online

This project aims to improve electronic access to the UK's significant Islamic manuscript collections at Oxford and Cambridge universities. It plans to create 10,000 summary records using a TEI P5 schema for future detailed descriptions, making these resources accessible through Oxford University Library Services and potentially contributing to the European Manuscriptorum. Collaboration with the Islamic Manuscript Association and other initiatives is a key focus.

Paleocoran

PALEOCORAN examines Qur’anic manuscripts that once belonged to the ‘Amr ibn al-‘Āṣ Mosque in al-Fusṭāṭ (Old Cairo) – one of the most significant Qur’anic Libraries – and are now scattered across the globe. The main objective of the project is to reconstruct the library and to make the manuscripts available digitally.

Patterns of Knowledge Circulation: The Transmission and Reception of Jewish Esoteric Knowledge in Manuscript and Print in Early Modern East-Central Europe (1500-1750)

This project aims to explore how Jewish esoteric knowledge circulated throughout history in multiple moves of transmission and reception that took place in various social, cultural, and material contexts in early modern East-Central Europe. To this end it will provide a systematic digital catalogue and quantitative analysis of esoteric Jewish texts produced and in circulation in East-Central Europe from 1500 to 1750. The catalogue will provide grounds for further analysis of transmission, reception, and movement of these texts and is designed to facilitate further qualitative studies of patterns of knowledge transmission based on quantitative analysis of relevant sources.

Persian Digital Library

Main goal of the project was to create the first machine-actionable premodern Persian corpus. Currently the project is focused on two inter-linked projects: (1) the construction of a scholarly-verified and machine actionable corpus, and (2) the development of optical character recognition (OCR)/handwritten text recognition (HTR) tools for Persian (and other Arabic-script languages).

Persian Manuscript Initiative

The Persian Manuscript Initiative partners with leading libraries and archives around the world to digitally preserve Persian manuscripts and improve the quality of metadata we have for them. The project is focused especially on preserving Persian manuscripts that may be at a risk of loss.

Pilotprojekt zur datenbankgestützten Erschließung und digitalen Bereitstellung der neu erworbenen arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig

In this project 55 Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts, that has been purchased by Leipzig University Library in 1995 and 1996, will be catalogued and digitalized. It is a pioneer project, as it will for the first time integrate Arabic script into a database that also features German and American transliteration systems. The manuscripts contain texts that cover an amazingly broad spectrum, which comprises almost all traditional Islamic fields of knowledge and the main scope of this project to provide scholars of Oriental Studies with access to this hitherto unknown pool of information.

Post-predicate Elements in Iranian: Inheritance, Contact, and Information Structure

This project is dedicated to the study of the syntax of Iranian languages. It will investigate selected Middle Iranian corpora, and unrelated contact languages, in order to reconstruct the genesis and historical development of Iranian syntax with focus on largely ignored OVX (object-verb-oblique) word order type. The project’s results will be made available on two platforms: The Word Order in Western Asia Corpus and The HamBam Corpus (see project websites).

Princeton Open HTR Initiative: Creating Infrastructure for Modeling Historical Texts

The project aims to advance digital humanities research by integrating eScriptorium handwritten text recognition (HTR) software into Princeton's research infrastructure. By making historical texts machine-readable, it enables text search and computational analysis at scale, lowering barriers of technical expertise and cost for humanities scholars. This pilot project explores creating a centralized resource for HTR to support diverse research workflows in the digital humanities.

Princton Genzia project

The Princeton Geniza Project (PGP) aims to digitize and make accessible the texts of the Cairo Geniza, integrating images, transcriptions, and metadata to support research on medieval Mediterranean life. From a digital humanities perspective, it demonstrates how computational tools and digital platforms can preserve, analyze, and democratize access to historical manuscripts.