New Publication on Islamic Digital Humanities

March 31, 2016 by EM

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new edited volume from De Gruyter entitled The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies. Many of the articles in this volume were given as papers at the 2013 conference of the same name, organized by Middle East Studies at Brown University.

Table of Contents

Elias Muhanna, Islamic and Middle East Studies and the Digital Turn
Travis Zadeh, Uncertainty and the Archive
Dagmar Riedel, Of Making Many Copies There is No End: The Digitization of Manuscripts and Printed Books in Arabic Script
Chip Rossetti, Al-Kindi on the Kindle: The Library of Arabic Literature and the Challenges of Publishing Bilingual Arabic-English Books
Nadia Yaqub, Working with Grassroots Digital Humanities Projects: The Case of the Tall al-Zaʿtar Facebook Groups
Maxim Romanov, Toward Abstract Models for Islamic History
Alex Brey, Quantifying the Quran
Till Grallert, Mapping Ottoman Damascus Through News Reports: A Practical Approach
José Haro Peralta and Peter Verkinderen, “Find for Me!”: Building a Context-Based Search Tool Using Python
Joel Blecher, Pedagogy and the Digital Humanities: Undergraduate Exploration into the Transmitters of Early Islamic Law
Dwight F. Reynolds, From Basmati Rice to the Bani Hilal: Digital Archives and Public Humanities

Manuscripts and Printed Books in Arabic Script in the Age of the E-Book: The Challenges of Digitization

May 22, 2013 by EM

I will discuss approaches to the digitization of Islamic books to explore its impact on Islamic and Middle East Studies, drawing on my research about the manuscript-print transition in Muslim societies within the context of technology transfer across Eurasia.

The digitization of books is widely accepted, because the digital processing of written language is merely the latest technology used for the display and storage of texts. E-books are on the verge of making the printed book an obsolete object, since for readers access to texts is all that matters. But the naturalization of the e-book is accompanied by the risk of diverting resources from the preservation of the material artifacts. Not every digital text has metadata which link the digital copy to its physical original whose whereabouts and provenance are known. Moreover, the long-time costs of digitization are rarely considered, even though the future functionality of digital surrogates, despite their immaterial appearance on our screens, depends on the continued investment into hardware and software, as well as into human labor.

The ubiquitous use of digitization by a wide range of institutions reflects that scholars, libraries, and grantmaking agencies, such as CLIR and the Imam Zayd Cultural Foundation, employ digitization for reasons quite different from those of commercial publishers. In North America the digitization of Islamic books is used to facilitate access to rare texts (e.g., Caro Minasian Collection, Hathi Trust Digital Library), to preserve endangered cultural heritage (e.g., Afghanistan Digital Library, Yemini Manuscript Digitization Initiative), or to allow for the crowdsourcing of uncataloged manuscripts (e.g., Collaboration in Cataloging). I will argue that in Islamic and Middle East Studies digitization receives little critical attention, because the access to a rare text is valued more highly than the historical interpretation of a specific book as material evidence for the transmission of knowledge.

Author: Dagmar Riedel (Columbia University)

Preserving Islamic Manuscripts Under Erasure: The Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative

May 22, 2013 by EM

The private manuscript libraries of Yemen comprise one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Arabic manuscripts. Collectively, these 6,000 private libraries possess some 60,000 codices, many of which are unique. But this irreplaceable trove of manuscripts is threatened. In recent years, Yemen’s private libraries have suffered great losses, in part due to extremists who are ideologically opposed to the Zaydi Shiite school of Islam and have targeted Zaydi manuscripts for destruction. In the past ten years, over 10,000 manuscripts, including several entire libraries, have been destroyed.

This paper describes the efforts of The Imam Zaid ben ‘Ali Cultural Foundation (IZbACF), a non-profit, non-governmental organization devoted to digitally preserving this collection. Their efforts have recently been fortified by The Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative (ymdi.uoregon.edu), a collective of Middle East librarians and leading scholars of classical Islam, Middle Eastern history, and Arabic Literature from North America, Europe, and the Middle East. In September, 2010, YMDI’s partner institutions Princeton University Library and Free University, Berlin secured a $330k Enriching Digital Collections Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The goal of the NEH/DFG grant has been to create an infrastructure through which manuscripts in private libraries in Yemen are digitally preserved and made widely available through Princeton University’s Digital Library. This paper presents YMDI’s progress and prospects.

Author: David Hollenberg (University of Oregon)