Dirk Wintergruen, Robert Casties, Sally Ragep, Jamil Ragep (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science / McGill)

The Open Mind database of the Islamic Scientific Manuscript Initiative (ISMI) 

Dec 13, 1pm, Arts 160

Traditional databases work well with structured data that can be organized into tables. But humanist scholars often deal with very unstructured information that is fluid and in need of flexible structures. The Open Mind database of the Islamic Scientific Manuscript Initiative (ISMI) was developed by humanist scholars and technical experts working jointly through a partnership between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies. The technical humanists and humanist technicians from both Institutes will discuss their experiences over almost a decade in developing the database and answer questions about how other projects can profit from the experiences made during the development of the project and how this open-source data structure might be re-used by other humanist scholars.