Theodore S. Beers, academic coordinator of "Closing the Gap in Non-Latin Sript Data" teaches the skills of a “digital humanist" to cover a range of topics that are relevant for philological work in Arabic and Islamic Studies in the digital age.

Research tasks: searching for manuscript copies of premodern texts (in Arabic and other languages of the Islamicate world) in various collections; downloading images of those manuscripts, where available; running software to analyze digitized texts, e.g., optical character recognition (OCR) for published works, or handwritten text recognition (HTR) for manuscripts; setting up a viable workflow for transcribing texts in Arabic-script languages; using Git for version control and storing/publishing work on GitHub; using corpora of digitized texts, e.g., al-Maktaba al-Shamila or Ganjoor; and accessing APIs.

The weekly course covers 13 sessions during summer semester 2024, see online curriculum for further details.

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