Islamicate Texts Initiative

islamicate-texts-initiative-itiThe Islamicate Texts Initiative (ITI) is a collaborative effort to construct the first machine-actionable corpus of premodern Islamicate texts.Led by researchers at the Aga Khan University (AKU), Universität Leipzig (UL), and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (College Park) and an interdisciplinary advisory board of leading digital humanists and Islamic, Persian, and Arabic studies scholars, ITI aims to provide the essential textual infrastructure in Persian and Arabic for new forms of macro textual analysis and digital scholarship. ITI is composed of three different projects:

  1. Open Arabic Project is curated by Maxim Romanov, research fellow at Alexander von Humboldt-Lehrstul für Digital Humanities, Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig who has been exploring for years how modern computational techniques of text analysis can be applied to the study of premodern Arabic historical sourcesal-raqmiyyat-digital-islamic-history2. The Persian Digital Library is managed by Samar Ali Ata, Program administrative specialist and Assistant to the Director at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Marylandpersian-digital-library-by-persdigumd3. KITAB is led by Sarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Agha Khan University-ISMC who specializes on the cultural history of the Middle East and Iran ca. 600-1100. provides a digital tool-box and a forum for discussions about Arabic texts. Although KITAB is currently a closed community, the corpus and search tools can be used upon request. kitab-knowledge-information-technology-and-the-arabic-books

Archnet

Launched in 2002, Archnet is the world’s largest open access architectural library focusing on Muslim societies. A shared initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Archnet aims at providing easy access to scholarly articles, data and original research that can be used for teaching, scholarship, and professional work in the fields of architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design in the Muslim worlds. Archnet is a continually growing resource, thanks to numerous donations of historic archives and documentation. In sum, “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.”

archnetArchnet is a fully searchable database offering different search options:

  • the Research page allows visitors to do a text search (basic or advanced) applying geographical and time filters
  • the Timeline allows to visualize “a linear outline of the history of art, architecture and urbanism in Muslim societies”
  • materials grouped in collections such as Women in Architecture, Tangier Then and Now, or Hassan Fathy can be accessed directly via the Collections page
  • additional resources and pedagogical tools are also made available through the Resources and Pedagogy pages.

The website is in English.

New acquisition: al-Manhal, a database of Arabic books & journals

McGill Library has now subscribed to the Islamic Studies Collection of AlManhal database which gives access to thousands of electronic scholarly books and journals in Arabic. The collection is full-text searchable in English and in Arabic, and browsable by subject, by title or by publisher. Documents can be read online, listened to, downloaded in PDF, or printed. And the reader offers interesting features such as sharing, annotating, citing or highlighting the text. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

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Bülent Ecevit articles online

bulent-ecevit-articles-arts-and-politics-in-the-1950sThe Bülent Ecevit articles database includes 1,500 Turkish- and English-language articles written by Bülent Ecevit between 1950 and 1961, most of them published in the prominent daily paper Ulus. While much is known of Ecevit’s long career as a statesman–beginning with his service as Minister of Labor 1961 and lasting well into the 2000s–this early chapter in his life remains largely unknown. Yet the cultural commentary, art criticism, political analyses and travel writings that he produced in the 1950s constitute an extraordinarily prolific and consistent body of work on the importance of civic culture and democracy. The columns reveal the seeds of his later political thought, as well as giving a new perspective on the importance of the arts to his intellectual life.

All original research has been carried out by Sarah-Neel Smith, research director for the Ecevit digitization project, with the collaboration of SALT Research and the Rahşan Ecevit-Bülent Ecevit Foundation of Science and Art & Culture (Ankara). Over a four year period, SALT Research scanned all of Ecevit’s publicly available writings and converted them to fully searchable texts which match the originals. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the Foundation founding member Emrehan Halıcı, Rahşan Ecevit, and her sister Asude Aral, who facilitated this project by supplying all the missing documents, the database encompasses Ecevit’s entire corpus of writing from the 1950s. All data has been compiled with permission of Rahşan Ecevit-Bülent Ecevit Foundation of Science and Art & Culture.

Sarah-Neel Smith, research director of the Ecevit digitization project, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she teaches modernism in a global and comparative perspective. The Ecevit online archive is the direct result of Smith’s ongoing research, begun in 2012, into Bülent Ecevit’s involvement in international debates about democracy and art after WWII. Her current book project How to Build An Art World: Art & Politics in 1950s Turkey investigates Ecevit’s place in the context of an emergent modern art world in the post-war period.

 

Records of the Kurds: territory, revolt and nationalism, 1831-1979

The Islamic Studies Library is currently trialing the Records of the Kurds: territory, revolt and nationalism, 2831-1979. British documentary sources collection. This set of 13 volumes includes documents tracing “early insurgencies of the Kurdish people directed against regional and metropolitan powers, their inter-relations with neighbouring tribes and other ethnic groups, while also depicting the extent of territories pertaining to the Kurdish homeland. The period witnessed the origins of Kurdish nationalist sentiments through a series of disparate revolts in the 19th century, through to a larger, more cohesive and discernible movement launched in the aftermath of World War One.”

fireshot-screen-capture-002-welcome-to-east-view-cambridge-archive-editio_-dlib_eastview_com_browse_books_1670_searchlink%2fsearch%2fsimpleDocuments are in Arabic, English and Kurdish (Sorani). The trial will be open until January 9th, 2017: try it out and let us know what you think!

Naval Kishore Press Bibliographie

Naval Kishore Press was founded in Lucknow, Northern India, in 1858 by Munshi Newal Kishore (3 January 1836-19 February 1885), and is considered the oldest printing and publishing house in the area. Naval Kishore Press published more than 5000 books in numerous languages including Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, English, Marathi, Punjabi, Pashto, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu.

search-homeThe Naval Kishore Press Bibliographie is a joint effort of Heidelberg University Library, and Heidelberg University South Asia Institute (SAI). It serves as a bibliographic database recording books and journals published by Naval Kishore Press, accessible in libraries around the world. Although the bibliography is still under construction, it includes 1.300 entries. And visitors are encouraged to suggest additional titles via email.

Bibliographic records can be searched by title, author, subject, ISBN/ISSN, series, year of publication, or browsed by language, format or provenance.

Titles that have been digitized and are available online can be accessed on Heidelberg University Library’s website Literature on South Asia – digitized / Subject / Collection.

جرائد : a database of Arabic newspapers of Ottoman and mandatory Palestine

Arabic Newspapers of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine جرائد [Jara’id] is a database of Palestinian newspapers published between 1908 and 1948. This initiative, led by the National Library of Israel, consists in digitizing periodicals from its collections to make them widely available. If the first phase of the project focused on two date ranges: 1908-1920 and 1945-1948 -which explains why only a few years are currently accessible for some titles- but the goal is to continue digitizing in order to provide an exhaustive archive of the Ottoman and mandatory Palestine period.

The database currently gives access to 27 titles published in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Bir Zeit, and other places. Among those, the visitor will find al-Nafais al-asriyah which is available from year 1908 to 1924, or Mir’at al-Sharq which is available from years 1919 to 1939. The viewer has interesting features:

  • a menu on the left hand-side of the screen to navigate journals and issues
  • two sets of arrows allowing to go from issue to issue, and to turn pages
  • a thumbnails view
  • the possibility to zoom in and out
  • a series of buttons to share (Twitter and Facebook), print, mail, download (in PDF), pin, link to a specific journal.

The website is trilingual: Arabic, English, Hebrew.

Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation online

The Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation online collection is a collection of official gazettes and historical government documentation from ten African and Persian Gulf countries. This project is the result of the digitization of official gazettes from the Center for Research Libraries‘ extensive collection of print and microfilm. CRL is alos planning on adding to the collection “by harvesting from the web more recent gazettes and related data published digitally”.

DDS Center for Research LibrariesThis collection includes issues from 24 different titles such as al-Jarīdah al-rasmīyah published in Libya, al-Waqāʼiʻ al-ʻIrāqīyah published in Iraq, or the Gazette of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan. Documents can either be read online or downloaded (full issue or a selection of pages) in PDF format.

Funding for digitization and hosting of the Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation collection was provided in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Centre for Research Libraries Middle Eastern & South Asian collections

Center for Research Libraries. Enriching Research. Expanding Possibilities. Since 1949. CRLFounded in 1949, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of over 200 universities, colleges, and independent research libraries in the U.S., Canada, India, Germany and Hong Kong. Since its foundation, CRL has been supporting both research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, by preserving and making available to scholars a wide range of primary source materials from all over the world. Based in Chicago,IL, the Centre for Research Libraries is governed by a Board of Directors drawn from the academic community. McGill University has been a member of CRL since 1973.

In 2016, CRL’s collections include five million items -among which more than 38,000 foreign journals, and 800,000 foreign dissertations- and are built by experts working at major U.S. and Canadian research universities.

Middle Eastern Studies CRL

The Middle Eastern studies’ collection and the South Asian studies’ collection both make accessible invaluable primary sources, in particular runs of historical journals in Arabic, Urdu and Hindi that are not to be found anywhere else.

In addition, the Center for Research Libraries provides access to a number of digital collections. The Digital South Asia Library is a collaborative project developed with the University of Chicago that makes available to scholars monographs, journals, full-text dictionaries, bibliographies, images, maps, and statistical information from the colonial period through the present. The WNA-South Asian Newspapers collection is the third module of the World Newspaper Archive, and includes colonial-era titles in English, Bengali, and Gujarati, published in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from 1864-1922. Among the key publications: Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), Bankura Darpana (Bankura), Madras Mail (Madras), Tribune (Lahore) and the Ceylon Observer (Sri Lanka).

Bibliotheca Alexandrina digital assets repository

Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt) digital assets repository gives free access to more than 137 000 ebooks full-text, among which 24 000 are in Arabic. In addition, it offers limited preview (5% of a title; minimum 10 pages) of over 230 000 copyrighted books, primarily in Arabic (200 000).

Book Site 3.1.2

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina DAR book viewer provides very convenient features including:

  • Full text search within the book’s title, subject, keywords, and content
  • Highlight of search results, and the possibility to highlight, underline and stick notes
  • Single page or two pages display, and one page at a time display to facilitate the opening of a book with a slow Internet connection
  • Multilingual interface.

This project, initiated in 1995 was implemented in 2002. The shared catalogue was developed in 2011 in collaboration with other institutions such as Internet Archive, the Arab World Institute (Paris, France), the Biodiversity Heritage Library, etc.

The interface is trilingual: Arabic, English and French.