Scholars and students in different disciplines of the humanities are increasingly relying on digital tools. Given the steadily growing number of projects of research institutions and universities with digital components, the digital humanities are flourishing and promise to offer new avenues for future research and innovation. Especially the engagement with manuscripts from the Islamicate world has thrived in recent years due to the new opportunities which arise when “Manuscripts Meet Digital Humanities.” The workshop of the same name convened by the Gotha Research Library, to be held online from 18 to 20 May, offers an integrative approach towards manuscript culture and digital humanities.
The study of how digitisation and computer-supported methodologies transform the engagement with the past of the Islamicate world and its cultural and literary heritage, as manifest in manuscript culture, is an integral part of this work.
The online workshop aims to facilitate the interdisciplinary training of young researchers responding to the challenges of digitisation in their respective fields. It draws on the resources of the Gotha Research Library, which preserves the third largest collection of oriental manuscripts in Germany, and on the expertise of international researchers and scholars working with manuscripts and digital tools. Papers revolve around Islamicate manuscripts in the digital humanities and deal with various aspects of digitisation, cataloguing, online presentation, and text recognition (OCR, Transkribus). The program aims to provide both a richly facetted theoretical and a practical approach to the digitisation, cataloguing, online presentation, and transcription of manuscripts.
The workshop is open to the public.