"Digital Classics in Arabic" gets funding from the British Academy

Digital Classics in Arabic (DCA)

Makdisi, George,1980. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh University Press.

        After a delay of one year(!), my project "Digital Classics in Arabic", funded by the British Academy and hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) of the University of London, has officially started. It has been a long journey from my office in Cairo until I arrived here safe and sound in London on Sunday the 7th of July 2019. I can not express how happy I am to start working in the ICS and I'm sure that, with the help and expertise of Gabriel Bodard, Charlotte Roueché and Valeria vitale, this project will achieve its goals and provide both our national and international classical and papyrological community with important tools and gadgets. For the moment I am just announcing the quick-off of this long-delayed project. So, dear classical and papyrological friends and colleagues (in and outside Egypt) stay tuned DCA is coming!

      As for the reasons behind this long delay, I will be giving a detailed account of this trip in a blogpost that will appear soon in "Everday Orientalism". For those who unfamiliar with this blog; this is the blog I, Katherine Blouin, and Rachel Mairs, are running for almost three years now. It's main focus is the discourse of Orientalism, Colonialism, Nationalism, politicized past in and around Antiquities-related disciplines. In addition to regular posts about these topics in English, French and Arabic, we are running an Egypt-based yearly workshop that brings together scholars from the Middle East, Europe, and North America, in order to reflect on the many ways in which Orientalism has shaped the field of “Classics” and its relationship to Egypt’s territory, history, and heritage. To know more about this initiative and our other activities, please visit the blog here https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/ .

DH LEIPZIG WORKSHOP WEEK 2015

A very busy week in Leipzig !

The Leipzig Workshop Week is comprised of a series of three related workshops in the week beginning 14th of December. In addition, the Sunoikisis DC Planning Seminar will run on the 16th and 17th.

For more information see the website here: http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/events/workshop-week-2015/ and see the full programme below.

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Ptolemæus Arabus et Latinus

Ptolemæus Arabus et Latinus is a project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the University of Würzburg. It has been established as part of the Akademienprogramm of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German federal states for a period of 25 years beginning in 2013. The project is dedicated to the edition and study of the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy's astronomical and astrological works and related material. The project director, Prof. Dr. Dag Nikolaus Hasse, is professor at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, while the researchers of the project are based at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich. The team includes two research leaders, Dr. David Juste and Dr. Benno van Dalen, and three full-time researchers, currently Dr. María José Parra Pérez, Dr. Henry Zepeda and the doctoral student Bojidar Dimitrov. A listing of the complete PAL team can be found here.

Al-Thurayyā Gazetteer of Arabic Toponyms of Maxim Romanov

This is our first usable demo of al-Thurayyā Gazetteer, see here http://maximromanov.github.io/2014/11-20.html . Currently it includes over 2,000 toponyms and almost as many route sections georeferenced from Georgette Cornu’s Atlas du monde arabo-islamique à l'époque classique: IXe-Xe siècles (Leiden: Brill, 1983). The gazetteer is searchable (upper left corner), although English equivalents are not yet included; in other words, look for Dimashq/دمشق, not Damascus.

al-Raqmiyyātالرقميات : Digital Islamic History of Maxim Romanov

Digital Islamic History, see here http://maximromanov.github.io/  is the website of Maxim Romanov, an expert in digital Arabic, who will be joining the Leipzig team of Digital Humanities this September. 

Maxim Romanov says about himself that he  is a "Postdoctoral Associate (PhD, U of Michigan) at the Department of Classics and the Perseus Project, Tufts University, who studies Islamic historical texts with computational methods, currently focusing on the analysis of multivolume biographical and bibliographical collections".

Kalb (Arabic قلب) a programming language written in Arabic codes

Kalb or Arabic قلب is a programming language developed by Ramsey Nasser to explore the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavsScript.


All modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin Characters and was originally based on the English Language. As a result, programming has become tied to a single written culture. It carries with it a cultural bias that favors those who grew up reading and writing in that cultural. قلب explores and challenges that by presenting a language that deviates almost entirely from ASCII.

More from here .

Naṣīr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī's editions of the Arabic versions of ancient Greek mathematical texts

First part of a collection of Naṣīr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī's (نصير الدين محمد بن محمد الطوسي; d. 1274) editions (تحارير) of the so-called intermediate books (متوسطات), Arabic versions of ancient Greek mathematical texts and responses to them which were meant to be read after Euclid's Elements and in preparation for Ptolemy's Almagest . The second part of this collection is found in manuscript IO Islamic 923.

The script, ornamentation and binding of the volume indicate that it is part of a set comprising also manuscripts IO Islamic 923 and IO Islamic 924. Since the latter was transcribed in 1198/1784, probably for Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785 (see front paper iirecto ), the collation notes in this manuscript dated to the month of Jumādá I without indication of the year probably refer to 1198 (March-April 1784).

Contents:
(1) Euclid (أقليدس), Data (تحرير كتاب المعطيات لإقليدس; ff. 1v-35r);
(2) Euclid (أقليدس), Optica (تحرير المناظر لإقليدس; ff. 36v-56r);
(3) Euclid (أقليدس), Phenomena (كتاب ظاهرات الفلك لأقليدس; ff. 57v-86r);
(4) Autolycus (أوطولوقس), De ortibus et occasibus (كتاب أوطولوقس في الطلوع والغروب; ff. 87v-110r);
(5) Hypsicles (إبسقلاوس), Anaphoricus (كتاب في المطالع; ff. 111v-116r);
(6) Archimedes (أرشميدس), De sphaera et cylindro (كتاب الكرة والأسطوانة; ff. 118v-231v);
(7) Archimedes (أرشميدس), Dimensio circuli (مقالة أرشميدس في تكسير الدائرة; ff. 231v-238r).

The book is extremely beautiful ! see from here.

Learn Arabic online (Aljazeera.net)

It's my pleasure to introduce this platform to all my colleagues all over the world.  Aljazeera Network has now a modern online platform, where one the Arabic language learn, improve, or just explore for fun. It's a professional learning platform mixing traditional Arabic-learning methods  with the modern digital ones. I hope you will enjoy it.

You can learn Arabic in a daily, or weekly basis with just a mouse-click !You can try this website through this link.

P.S.

It's fun for me too !