14362 Advanced seminar

SoSe 24: Digital Philological Methods for Arabic and Islamic Studies

Theodore Samuel Beers

Comments

This course will be taught primarily in English and is intended for upper-level BA students and MA students in Arabic and Islamic Studies who would like to develop the skills of a “digital humanist.” Students should bring their own laptops to class; part of the idea is for everyone to get a good development environment set up on their machine, to build some familiarity with command-line scripting, etc. Over the course of the semester, we will cover a range of topics that are relevant for philological work in Arabic and Islamic Studies in the digital age. The following are some of the research tasks that are envisioned: searching for manuscript copies of premodern texts (in Arabic and other languages of the Islamicate world) in various collections; downloading images of those manuscripts, where available; running software to analyze digitized texts, e.g., optical character recognition (OCR) for published works, or handwritten text recognition (HTR) for manuscripts; setting up a viable workflow for transcribing texts in Arabic-script languages; using Git for version control and storing/publishing work on GitHub; using corpora of digitized texts, e.g., al-Maktaba al-Shamila or Ganjoor; and accessing APIs. Again, this list is not exhaustive. Nor can everything be taught in one semester; but we will make substantial progress. close

Suggested reading

We will use a wide range of materials, with one of the central resources being Cornelis van Lit’s Among Digitized Manuscripts (Brill, 2020).

13 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Wed, 2024-04-17 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-04-24 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-05-08 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-05-15 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-05-22 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-05-29 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-06-05 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-06-12 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-06-19 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-06-26 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-07-03 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-07-10 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Wed, 2024-07-17 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Theodore Samuel Beers

Location:
-1.2002 PC-Raum (UG) (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

Subjects A - Z