Digital Toolbox for Iranian Studies

 Digital Toolbox for Iranian Studies

"The toolbox aims at collecting all available digital resources that are relevant to Iranian Studies & related fields of study. It may help you to find:

• primary sources & academic literature
• manuscripts & objects in digital archives & collections
• historic maps, coinage, linguistic corpora
• academic publications & institutions
• podcasts, blogs & academic communities
• and useful apps for your research"

 

OPEN ISLAMICATE TEXTS INITIATIVE

"Funded through two grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Phase One of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) is the first undertaking of its kind to tackle the technical and organizational barriers that historically have stymied the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production for Islamicate Studies.

OpenITI AOCP is led by an interdisciplinary team of humanities, computer science, and digital humanities co-principal investigators from Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park. We are proud to partner with the SHARIAsource project of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and the eScripta project of Université Paris Sciences et Lettres for the technical development portion of the project.

The primary technical goal of the first phase of OpenITI AOCP is to achieve ≥97% character accuracy rates (CARs) for OCR on the most used Persian and Arabic print typefaces. 

The second major deliverable of OpenITI AOCP is an open-source and user-friendly digital text production pipeline for Persian and Arabic texts."

Collection of Ottoman censuses on the website of the Hungarian National Archives

 

"„Oszmán összeírások gyűjteménye” a Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár honlapján"

by Szepesiné Simon Éva, National a Hungary

The database "Collection of Ottoman censuses", available at Adatbázisok Online of the National Archives of Hungary, provides an insight into the Ottoman period and the struggling daily life of the Ottoman-Hungarian border region. The database, which currently contains some 26 300 records, primarily focuses on income and property records obtained from the Ottoman tax registers (tapu defterleri) covering the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary and makes them accessible to all, but the structure of the database is suitable for displaying all administrative units of the Ottoman Empire in the future. The collection, which offers both easy and quick access and comparative research, is recommended not only for historians, but for those interested in military history or the past of their localities, too."

Ottoman Censuses: https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/blog/collection-of-ottoman-censuses-on-the-website-of-the-hungarian-national-archives/. 

Open Access E-Book: Arabic translation of : Remote Capture: Digitising Documentary Heritage in Challenging Locations

Edited by: Jody Butterworth, Andrew Pearson, Patrick Sutherland and Adam Farquhar.
Published by: Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK)

© 2021. Arabic Translation by Nouran Ibrahim Abdelraouf.

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783744763
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783744770
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0138

 "In 2020, EAP received a generous grant from the Barakat Trust to translate Remote Capture: Digitising Documentary Heritage in Challenging Locations into Arabic as part of outreach within the Middle East and North Africa regions. Nouran Ibrahim Abdelraouf did all the hard work of translating the book and now that it is available online via the EAP website, we thought it would be the right time to ask her a few questions that we could share on our blog."

English original : https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/747#resources

Open Access Book: Among Digitized Manuscripts. Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World

Author: Lit, Lambertus W. C.
Title: Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World.
Published: Leiden ; Boston Brill [2020]
ISBN: 9789004400351

"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."

"Blogs you should be adding to your bookmarks"

Hazine blog published a list of various blogs worth following on Islamic manuscripts, Middle East literature, culture, history, digital humanities, etc.

Happy to report AMIR was included in the list.

Historiography of Early Modern Ottoman Europe (HOE) Database

HOE is a collection of meta-data focusing on historiographical writing of Early Modern Ottoman Europe (1500-1800). It brings together published and unpublished primary sources (chronicles, histories, hagiographies, inscriptions, maps…), as well as secondary material (“Main Section”). It also offers information on specific collections, as well as a wide variety of references to tools and resources useful to those navigating the research questions of Early Modern historiography (“Tools Section”).

HOE provides information on the author(s), title(s), contents, manuscript(s) and edition(s) of the main sources related to the topic. Regarding these sources, it offers bibliographical meta-data in the form of both library-specific and internationally recognized identifiers. This information is augmented by links to online resources and related literature. Thus, HOE allows for quick and comprehensive overview of where to find primary sources, who was/is connected to their generation and proliferation, which secondary sources in which editions, printed and online there are, etc.… It is a research tool for easy, comprehensive, quality reference.

You can switch between the Main Section and the Tool Section at will. Different facets and filters will help you refine your search.

If you are looking for specific works, you can use the search function to find its title, transcribed title or translated title. In each entry, different pieces of related information and links are made available, depending on the type of source you have selected. And in every case, there will be links to its related sources, which allow you to quickly and precisely access a source’s siblings or derivates.

URL

Open Source Arabic OCR

Working paper :
Important New Developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) by

Maxim Romanov, Matthew Thomas Miller, Sarah Bowen Savant, and Benjamin Kiessling.

 Highlights from the paper:

"The OpenITI team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University’s (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties " 

"The specific type of OCR software that we employed in our tests is an
open-source OCR program called Kraken, which was developed by Benjamin
Kiessling at Leipzig University’s Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital
Humanities. Unlike more traditional OCR approaches, Kraken relies on a neural
network—which mimics the way we learn—to recognize letters in the images of
entire lines of text without trying first to segment lines into words and then words
into letters."

"The most important advantage of Kraken is that its workflow allows one to train new
models relatively easily, including text-specific ones. In a nutshell, the process of
training requires a transcription of approximately 800 lines (the number will vary
depending on the complexity of the typeface) aligned with images of these lines as
they appear in the printed edition."

 "The two rounds of testing presented here indicate that with a fairly modest amount
of gold standard training data (~800–1,000 lines) Kraken is consistently able to
produce OCR results for Arabic-script documents that achieve accuracy rates in the
high nineties."

"In the long term, we will are also planning to train models for other Islamicate languages (Ottoman Turkish,Urdu, Syriac, etc.). Our hope is that an easy-to-use and effective OCR pipeline will allow us all—collectively—to significantly enrich our collection of digital Islamicate texts and thereby enable us to understand better this fascinating and understudied textual tradition."





 

Digital Islamic Humanities Project - Resources

Digital Islamic Humanities Project - Resources

Thank you for visiting the site for the Digital Islamic Humanities Project, a research initiative led by Professor Elias Muhanna at Brown University. On October 24-25, 2013, we hosted an international conference on the Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies. The entire conference is available to watch online by clicking the webcast buttons in the upper right-hand corner of this site. Paper abstracts and participant bios can be found on this site, along with other resources, news, a blog, and a working bibliography.

Textual Databases

Al-Warraq: A searchable database of several hundred classical Arabic texts.
Al-Maktaba al-Shamela: Homepage for this downloadable library, comprising thousands of Arabic texts.
Digital Persian Archive: A database of Persian historical documents from Iran and Central Asia up to the 20th century.
Al-Maktaba al-Waqfiyya: Scanned PDFs of Arabic texts.
Multaqa Ahl al-Hadith: Scanned PDFs of Arabic texts.
Altafsir.com: Searchable database of dozens of classical and modern Arabic exegetical texts.
Qur’anic Arabic Corpus: An annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic grammar, syntax and morphology for each word in the Holy Quran. The corpus provides three levels of analysis: morphological annotation, a syntactic treebank and a semantic ontology.
Al-Mishkat: Searchable database of classical Arabic texts.
Al-Mostafa: Database of downloadable PDFs of Arabic texts, modern and classical.
Noor Library: A collection of digital texts in Persian.

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Manuscript/Image Databases and Catalogues

Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan, Michigan University Libraries, 2009-2012.  Crowd-sourced cataloging project. For a project description, see: Evyn Kropf and Jonathan Rodgers, “Collaboration in Cataloguing: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan,” MELA Notes 82 (2009): 17-29.
Die Damaszener Familienbibliothek Refaiya, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2008-2012.  The website provides access to digitized manuscripts as well as catalogs and research.
Fihrist: Islamic Manuscript Catalogue Online: British union catalogue for manuscripts in Arabic script.  The project originated with the Oxford and Cambridge Islamic Manuscript Catalogue Online (OCIMCO), 2009-2011.
Islamic Seals Database, Chester Beatty Library Dublin.  Crowd-sourced cataloguing project.

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Tools and Tutorials

Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
Conversion of Islamic and Christian Dates, website created by J. Thomann for the Institute of Oriental Studies at Zurich University, 1996-2010.  Conversion tools for the Coptic, Persian (Era of Yazdigird), Islamic lunar (AH), and Ottoman māliyyah calendars are available.
GeoTemCo: comparative visualization of temporal data by Stefan Jänicke.
GeoNames: a searchable directory of coordinates for locations around the world (just make sure that if you are looking for Medina, it is not Medina, OH)
iTouchMap: convenient for reverse geocoding, or getting the precise coordinates of what you can see on the map.
FCC.gov has a tool to convert coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds into decimal values.
EditPad Pro / EditPad Lite: a great text-editor that easily handles long texts in Unicode and supports regular expressions;
Python tutorial: Online tutorial for this powerful dynamic programming language.
Regular Expressions: a tool for complex manipulations with patterned text.

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Dictionaries

Lane’s Arabic Lexicon: Available in the following locations: Alpheios (a part of reading tools for Mozilla Firefox; URL LookUp); Perseus Project (text/XML, browsable and searchable); Tyndale House (images, browsable by letters and roots).
Wehr-Lane-Hava Triptych: Search all three of these standard Arabic-English dictionaries on one page.
Steingass’s Persian-English Dictionary: Search the authoritative dictionary for classical Persian.

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Resource Pages, Blogs, and Bibliographies

Open Access Digital Resources by Dagmar Riedel (Columbia University)
A List of Resource Websites by Dagmar Riedel (Columbia University)
Al-Raqmiyyat.org: Maxim Romanov’s blog
Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies (COMSt), a research network program of the European Science Foundation (ESF), 2009-2014.
Archnet: Archnet is a globally-accessible, intellectual resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world. Archnet’s mission is to provide ready access to unique visual and textual material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and professional work of high quality. Officially launched in 2002 as a partnership between the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Archnet has since evolved into the largest open, online architectural library with a focus on Muslim cultures. Its digital archives form a comprehensive resource on architecture, urban design, landscape, development, and related issues. Archnet provides a bridge for interested persons to learn how to enhance the quality of the built environment, to compensate for lack of resources for students and faculty in academic institutions, and to highlight the culture and traditions of Islam.