A week or so ago I attended a workshop organized by the recently-established Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis at IUB. The workshop was on Omeka, a digital publishing platform tailored for librarians, archivists and humanists who want to curate collections and research materials online. I attended because I'm becoming more and more interested in possible ways of being to present aspects of my research online, ways that require more sophisticated storage and hosting options than are available through (admittedly, pretty good) blog platforms like Blogspot or Wordpress.
Omeka is becoming increasingly popular with humanists whose research incorporates strongly visual components: manuscripts, photographs, paintings, illustrations &c. The attractions for someone like me, who is interested in the rich world of medieval and early-modern Central Asian manuscript traditions, are obvious; moreover, it brings me into synch with developments in online curation that are currently impacting upon my own research: thanks to digitization initiatives such as Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan, Islamic Heritage Project at Harvard University, and Walters Arts Museum Islamic Manuscripts, I've been able to acquire research materials that once would have required sensitive negotiation and not insubstantial travel costs and copying fees to acquire.
In fact, I learned about the latter goldmine as a direct result of the Omeka workshop: the Walters Art Museum has made publicly available the metadata of its Islamic manuscripts, and the workshop convenors used it as an example of how spreadsheets can be imported (with the aid of a plug-in) into your Omeka site and used to generate new metadata fields.
Not previously aware of the Walters Art Museum (ignorant me!), or its precious collection of Islamic manuscripts, I was delighted to find that it has a fine Safavid copy of نوائی's خمسه, attributed to the 16th cent. As I begin to construct my my research agenda and schedule for the dissertation, the easy availability of such a fine work - unthought of 10-15 years ago - drives home to me the transformational nature of the digital humanities and its benefits to the researcher.
4 comments:
Thank God for digitization! I suspect Digital Humanities is going to be pretty big. I was speaking with an Islamic & Middle East Studies librarian and he told me that that their university while the heads were cutting back budgets on buying physical copies of books and journals it was pretty much carte blanche for e-books etc.,
I do miss those old books where you could feel the type pressed into the page (like the Royal Asiatic Society ones), but I think I'm just an old fuddy duddy when it comes to books.
Btw, are you planning on attending Persianate Societies conference?
I agree that nothing beats the feel of manuscripts and old books, but I'm ready to out tactile considerations to one side in the pursuit of Nava'i MSS.
Another recent discovery is gallica.fr, where the Bibliotheque nationale de France has uploaded several scanned versions of Nava'i MSS.
As to conferences: I'm tempted by the ASPS 6th Biannual conference in Sarahevo next year. You?
Yeah, I'll be headed into my third year so I figure I should start looking at conferences. In the span of 3 months there are three promising ones: ASPS, the one on Asia by SSHRC & Yale (I think it circulated on adabiyat and H-NET but I'll forward it to you if you want) in Istanbul, and then of course MESA (in New Orleans! can you imagine the food?).
I'm really tempted by the Sarahevo one. I am thinking possibly of presenting on concubinage in late Timurid Iran-Early Mughal India. Kind of think that fits the Persinate Societies M.O. Also, Bosnia!
Thank you for the reference for the bibliotheque nationale de France. I have heard they are quite good about digitizing manuscripts for you.
It's true. I am always foiled when I'm told a lithograph I want to look at is now in the Rare books collection with limited reproduction etc., etc.,
I hope you are taking some time off and relaxing in the holidays.
Post a Comment