InterSaME Project Materials v1.0

These materials are part of the outputs of the AHRC-DFG project ‘The intertwined world of the oral and written transmission of sacred traditions in the Middle East’ (InterSaME). The project investigated the representation of oral traditions in Arabic Qur’ans, Syriac Bibles, and Arabic transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible. The Qur’anic strand, led by Alba Fedeli at Universität Hamburg, generated tools for and data from the edition of Qur’anic manuscripts as follows:

1- Alba Fedeli, Editions of Early Partially Dotted Qur’anic Manuscripts (download). The editions with editorial notes by Alba Fedeli have been created in several formats with technical support by Alicia González Martínez and Carolin Kinne-Wall: in plain text in Sublime (editions nos. 1 and 5); in XML in the editorial environment of ArQuM and in Json (editions no. 2-4, 6-8) for their mapping and statistical analysis by applying the script designed for this specific purpose (see material no. 4); in XML in the editorial environment of ArQuM using also the pointer for the encoding of the dots through a two vector position (editions no. 9-13) for their analysis and visualization (see material no. 5);

2- Alicia González Martínez, InterSaME Keyboard Layout (description and installation file for Microsoft, download). The InterSaME keyboard layout for transcribing aims at including all the symbols used in editing the manuscript text directly as keys in the keyboard according to the encoding system developed by Fedeli;

3- Alicia González Martínez, InterSaME Data Pipeline (download). The package contains all the scripts for the conversion of the Arabic text into Latin characters and symbols according to the system developed by Fedeli for the encoding of diacritics and dot positions and for the alignment of the manuscript text with the base text in order to process the data;

4- Hythem Sidky, Script for Diacritic Analysis of Qur’anic Manuscripts (download). The aim of the script developed by Sidky is the statistical analysis of the contextual distribution of diacritics (both consonantal diacritics and vowel dots) applied to data from InterSaME editions of Qur’anic manuscripts;

5- Hythem Sidky, Script for Dot Visualization (download). The aim of the script developed by Sidky is to provide a reconstructed visualization of dot positions generated by means of a pointer in the editorial environment that merges image annotation and text encoding. The reconstructed visualization of the dot positions enables the scholar to explore the function of dots;

6- Carolin Kinne-Wall, Alba Fedeli, Hythem Sidky and Alicia González Martínez, InterSaME Docker Image (download). The docker container provides the customization of Archetype software for the editing and image annotation of Qur’anic manuscripts. The implementation includes the pointer tool for the encoding of dots according to a two-vector position and the whole tagging system structured by Fedeli for editing the manuscript lacunae, subdivisions of the text and disagreement of the manuscript text against the base text;

7- Nadine Chahine, Alba Fedeli and Carolin Kinne-Wall, Table of ArQuM Font (download). The table displays an Arabic typeface for the editing of early Qur’anic manuscripts (in early Abbasid script style) developed by Nadine Chahine in collaboration with Fedeli and Kinne-Wall.

Acknowledgement

The research project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Principal investigators were Alba Fedeli (Universität Hamburg) and Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge). The German team of Universität Hamburg worked on the Qur’an manuscript material and the British team of the University of Cambridge investigated Syriac and Hebrew Bible manuscripts.

The German team was hosted at the Asia Afrika Institute and the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg.

The docker container is a customization of Archetype software (previously called "the DigiPal framework"), a generic, open-source software framework for the analysis and presentation of palaeographical and related materials and texts. It was first developed as part of the Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic (DigiPal), a project funded by the European Research Council to bring digital technology to bear on the scholarly discussion of medieval handwriting. Later, the software was maintained by the King’s Digital Lab at King’s College London.

The research project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It ran from 2020 to 2023. DFG reference number: 428993887 AHRC project number: AH/T01282X/1