Monday, November 13, 2023

Audition Certificates Platform Search for names, places and any term in audition certificates. ACP uses Arabic script only, no Latin transliteration.

 

"Unlocking the transmission archive in Arabic manuscript cultures

Audition certificates (سماع, طبقة السماع or إجازة) are a salient feature of Arabic manuscript cultures. They are notes written on a book to document the authorised transmission of the book’s text from teacher(s) to student(s). In concrete terms, the text was read out aloud (by the teacher or one of the students) and at the end of the reading session one of the members of this reading group added the audition certificate to the book. By virtue of their participation all students now had the right to act as teacher in future reading sessions.

Audition certificates are brimming with data and can include: the name of the teacher(s), the name of the student(s) (including highlighting those coming late or leaving early), the name of the reader, the name of the writer of the certificate, the name of the book’s owner, the date of the reading, the place of the reading and many other surprises (such as a writer recording the birth of his son during the reading session in the room next door). These certificates contain a wealth of historical data, in particular on persons we do not find in many other sources such as women and slaves. They are thus a source of outstanding importance for fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. It goes without saying that, especially in a comparative perspective with other world regions, such as Latin Europe, this copious material represents a considerable resource for widening our understanding of Middle Eastern societies. 

So far, the field of Middle Eastern history has used this unparalleled source for medieval history only for individual manuscripts or small corpora. The problem is simply that audition certificates are distributed in tens of thousands of manuscripts around the globe and that no systematic project to make them available was ever started. The farthest we got was a collaborative project between German and Syrian colleagues who published in facsimile a selection of certificates from the National Syrian Library in Damascus and provided them with an enormous index:

Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya. Les certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 1996 and Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya - ṣūwar al-makhṭūṭāt. Recueil de documents fac-similés des certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 2000

ACP is the first major project aimed at unlocking the potential of this unique source corpus.  We have started to go through the holdings of selected libraries (Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Syrian National Library), but we cannot claim to have identified all audition certificates in the manuscript books on their shelves. We will continue to go through further collections to enlarge this first large-scale and fully searchable corpus of audition certificates. 

The data set underlying ACP is available as open access publication stored in the Research Data Repository at Universität Hamburg, https://www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/record/13525. The data set is published under a CC BY 4.0 license allowing it to be reused for other projects. ACP will be updated periodically with consecutively numbered new versions. The current version 1.0  was published 26.10.2023.

 Audition certificates are the result of complex documentary practices and they were written by highly specialised communities. We have only started to understand many of the scribal practices, documentary logics and archival practices that shaped the various forms of certificates in different places and in different periods. The following list provides some background in order to understand the wider historical context of the certificates and the practices that shaped them:

 سعید ضامن الجومانيدلالات المصطلحات الواردة في مجالس السماع والقراءة في المخطوطات العربية

Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 11 (2020) 106-132.

سعید ضامن الجومانيوثيقة جديدة عن نقل العِلم في التاريخ الإسلامي. تحقيق أوراق السّماع لسنن الدّارقطني, مجلة كلية الشريعة والدراسات الإسلامي 38-2 [2021], 19ـ75.

Davidson, Garrett: Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission Across a Millennium, Leiden 2020.

Hirschler, Konrad: A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Edinburgh 2020.

سعید ضامن الجومانيصور الإجازات المنقولة في المخطوطات العربية: السبب، والوظيفة

Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9 (2018) 72-100.

Andreas Görke/Konrad Hirschler (eds), Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources, Würzburg 2011.

Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya. Les certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 1996.

Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya - ṣūwar al-makhṭūṭāt. Recueil de documents fac-similés des certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 2000.

Leder, Stefan: ‘Hörerzertifikate als Dokumente für die islamische Lehrkultur des Mittelalters’, in R. Khoury (ed.), Urkunden und Urkundenformulare im klassischen Altertum und in den orientalischen Kulturen, Heidelberg 1999, 147-66. 

Leder, Stefan: ‘Eine neue Quelle zur Stadtgeschichte von Damaskus. Zur Alltagsgeschichte der Ḥadīthwissenschaft’, in H. Preissler (ed.), Annäherung an das Fremde, Stuttgart 1998, 268-79.

صلاح الدين المنجدإجازة السماع في المخطوطات القديمة, مجلة معهد المخطوطات العربية 1 (1955), 51-232."

Audition Certificates Platform URL: https://www.audition-certificates-platform.org/. 

 

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

New OA book: Proposals for the Transformation of Istanbul's Unkapanı Flour Mill



Authors: Gerritsen, Fokke, Özçakır, Özgün, Arslan, Aysel, Kayasü, Sena, Yurdagül, Sedef.
Published: Istanbul: Netherlands Institute in Turkey, 2023
ISBN : 9786057259004

"What are the ways that industrial heritage places are transformed, both considering their tangible and intangible values as well as their potential to achieve urban inclusivity, sustainability, circularity as well as public engagement?

The present book is one of the outcomes of the inaugural program of NIT Urban Heritage Lab. Following an introduction on the course, its scope and aims, it showcases the four proposals that the participants of the Industrial Heritage for Sustainable Cities Course developed for the transformation of the Unkapanı Flour Mill. The proposals are original, thought-provoking and inspirational, while at the same time based on solid multi-disciplinary, collaborative work. So, they are perfect demonstrations of what NIT Urban Heritage Lab tries to achieve.

Cite as:

Gerritsen, Fokke, Özçakır, Özgün, Arslan, Aysel, Kayasü, Sena, Yurdagül, Sedef. (2023). Industrial Heritage for Sustainable Cities: Proposals for the Transformation of Istanbul's Unkapanı Flour Mill. Istanbul: Netherlands Institute in Turkey.



Table of Contents

Introducing NIT Urban Heritage Lab and the Industrial Heritage for Sustainable Cities Program
Fokke Gerritsen

Industrial Heritage for Sustainable Cities: Course Aims and Overview
Özgün Özçakır, Fokke Gerritsen, Aysel Arslan

Once the Belly of Istanbul: Unkapanı as a Food Provisioning Center
Namık Günay Erkal

A Plan for the Transformation of Unkapanı Mill into an Educational Complex
Mehmet Alper


Project Proposals

Unkapanı Community Garden: By the Community, for the Community
Yelyzaveta Nesterova, Batoul Mesdaghi, Tijana Veljkovic, Gülhayat Kılcı, Yonca Atabay

Adaptive Transformation of the Mill through Urban Promenade: Monologue, Dialogue, Travelogue
Miraç Ayça Türkfiliz, Mustafa Can Terzi, Seda Naniç, Tuğçe Halıcı, Yihan Li

Unkapanı Beyond the Walls: Regeneration of Urban Space Through the Recovery of Post-Industrial Places
Cem Balcan, Elif Leblebici, Nurşah Atamtürk, Tuğçe Türk, Yanming Wu

Unkapanı Flour Mill: An Urban Catalyzer
Aybüke Safi, Yasemin Çakır, Meriç Altıntaş Kaptan, Merve Torlak, Nazlı Arslan, Sena Kayasü, Taiwo Samuel Orisade

Reflections on Project Proposals

A Multidisciplinary Studio on the Sustainability of Urban Industrial Heritage
Nilüfer Baturayoğlu Yöney

Recovering Unkapanı for a Different Future: Industrial Heritage for Sustainable Cities
Harry Reddick"

Monday, May 8, 2023

New Open Access Journal: Souffles Monde: A Pan-African Platform & Journal


Souffles Monde: A Pan-African Platform & Journal

Souffles Monde: Issue #1
CULTURE AND DIFFERENCE IN MOROCCO
April 2023

"Our aim is to resurrect the magazine Souffles, which fifty years ago, was a flagship journal of the pan-African and Third World Left. Our hope is to use this publication as a platform for academic exchange across Africa."


Friday, April 21, 2023

Open Access Book: Scholarship in Action: Essays on the Life and Work of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936)


Title: Scholarship in Action: Essays on the Life and Work of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936)

Editors: Volume Editors: Léon Buskens, Jan Just Witkam, and Annemarie van Sandwijk
Published: Brill
Date: 2021

Series: The History of Oriental Studies, Volume: 12

ISBN: 9789004513617 (PDF)
ISBN: 9789004513594

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

New Open Access Journal: Keshif: E-Journal for Ottoman-Turkish Micro Editions



Keshif: E-Journal for Ottoman-Turkish Micro Editions
Published: The Institute for Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna, 2023-
ISSN: 2960-4311

Keshif’s first issue has been published!

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023)

See also : Alphabetical List of Open Access Journals in Middle Eastern Studies


Illegibles


Thursday, March 23, 2023

The Quran. Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies. Vol. 1: Adjectives, Nouns, Proper Nouns and Verbs

May be an image of ‎monument, outdoors and ‎text that says "‎القرآن The Quran Morphological Forms of the Key Words Sorted by Sura Adjectives, Nouns, Proper Nouns and Verbs Elie Wardini GORGIAS PRESS‎"‎‎

The aim with the present series, The Quran: Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies, is to present key data related to the lexicon of the Quran, in terms of Key Word distribution and lexical associations. The digital text used for this purpose is the Uthmani text of the Tanzil Quran Text. This text is widely used. All vocalized Arabic text is quoted unaltered in any shape or form from the Tanzil text. Unvocalized Arabic text and transcriptions are my own. In this series, each Key Word, here adjectives, nouns, proper nouns and verbs, is presented together with the following key data: Degree of Concentration, Weighted Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies. The Key Words are always referenced by their lemma and are sorted alphabetically according to Arabic and UNICODE order. In lemmatizing the words, no attention has been given to the semantics of each word. Only on rare occasion have similar forms of words or proper nouns been separated in order to avoid confusion. In assigning each word a lemma, Classical dictionaries and Quran commentaries, as well as modern Quran dictionaries have been consulted. Deciding on these is not always obvious, since classical dictionaries and commentaries sometimes either disagree or present divergent variant readings or root and lemma attributions. It is our hope and aim that this series contributes to Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities in general, and Computational Linguistics research on the Quran in particular.

Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC
SKU (ISBN): 978-1-4632-4414-9
Publication Date: Feb 23,2022
Interior Color: Black
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Page Count: 516
Languages: Arabic, English
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4414-9