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History of Humanities

Last week, I taught about Anquetil-Duperron, William Jones, the discovery of language similarity and the beginnings of IE Studies. Disciplines such as Iranian Studies or #Indology, as we know them today, would not have been possible without those efforts and contributions. I also made it a point to at least briefly discuss “genesis amnesia” and the critical examination of Oriental Studies offered by @tavak in

  • Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. 2001. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, occidentalism and historiography. Palgrave Macmillan.

I was glad to discover this morning, the wonderful 2019 themed issue of “History of Humanities“, Vol 4(2), dedicated to “Classics of the Humanities” & edited, it seems, by @rensbod & Kasper Eskildsen. This is the original tweet by Rens Bod:

Our anthology on The Classics of the Humanities has been published, and it’s free!
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hoh/current
It includes foundational texts from philology, historiography, art history, literary theory, oriental studies, archaeology, linguistics, digital humanities and more.

https://twitter.com/rensbod/status/1188024358071087104

As @rensbod writes, the volume “includes foundational texts from philology, historiography, art history, literary theory, oriental studies, archaeology, linguistics, digital humanities and more.”

“Some texts have been translated into English for the first time.” For instance, “Karl Lachmann’s introduction to stemmatic philology” which has until now been available only in Latin.

The original texts are here: historyofhumanities.org/resources/

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Digital humanities and text re-use

The concept of text re-use in early Islamic historiography was first brought to my attention by François de Blois, whose courses were always so much more than just an introduction to a language such as Middle Persian. Recently, it has been Sarah Savant, who has drawn attention to text re-use and its application in the study of early Islamic literature. And now there is this very exciting Hackathon taking place in Göttingen in July 2015:

Digital Humanities Hackathon on Text Re-Use

‘Don’t leave your data problems at home!’

The Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities will host a Hackathon targeted at students and researchers with a humanities background who wish to improve their computer skills by working with their own data-set. Rather than teaching everything there is to know about algorithms, the Hackathon will assist participants with their specific data-related problem, so that they can take away the knowledge needed to tackle the issue(s) at hand. The focus of this Hackathon is automatic text re-use detection and aims at engaging participants in intensive collaboration. Participants will be introduced to technologies representing the state of the art in the field and shown the potential of text re-use detection. Participants will also be able to equip themselves with the necessary knowledge to make sense of the output generated by algorithms detecting text re-use, and will gain an understanding of which algorithms best fit certain types of textual data. Finally, participants will be introduced to some text re-use visualisations.

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Afghanistan Digital Library

The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage. The project is collecting, cataloging, digitizing, and making available over the Internet as many Afghan publications from the period 1871–1930 as it is possible to identify and locate.

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Symposium: British Library Persian manuscripts

The British Library is holding a one-day symposium on the theme of digitisation and new research on its collection of Persian manuscripts, one of the most significant in the world in both size and importance.

British Library Persian Manuscripts: Collections and Research
British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
Friday, 31 October 2014, 9.30-18.00

Registration:
Booking will be available from Monday 22 September from British Library Events. Tickets include a light lunch and refreshments and are priced at £15 (£10 concessions).
For more information, see here.
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EAGLE 2014 International Conference

International Conference on Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Digital Cultural Heritage in the Ancient World

29 September–1 October 2014, Paris, France

Organised by EAGLE with the support of Collège de France Chaire Religion, institutions et société de la Rome antique and École Normale Supérieure.

For more information, see here.

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Introduction to TEI and oXygen

As part of our group’s ongoing engagement with the Yasna, I will be leading a one day workshop on TEI and oXygen. This is an internal meeting with the aim of introducing the participants of the Yasna project to the ideas behind encoding texts and exploring features offered by the oXygen XML editor.

This is the first session in a series of meetings to be held at the Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge.

Date & time: Saturday 25 Jan 2014; 14:00–18:00
Location: AIIT, Cambridge

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Conference on Digital Islamic Humanities

The Asian and African studies blog of the British Library has a very useful summary of the recent conference, The Digital Humanities + Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, which was organised and hosted by the Middle Eastern Studies Department of Brown University. The overview has links to some of the papers, slides and project websites.

Webcasts of both days are available on the conference website.