Theodore S. Beers, academic coordinator of "Closing the Gap in Non-Latin Script 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.

This unit is part of the weekly seminar in Digital Philological Methods for Arabic and Islamic Studies covering 13 sessions in the summer semester 2024, see online curriculum for further details.

Units may be joined separately (crediting possible for full course only), please contact Th. S. Beers theo.beers@fu-berlin.de in case you wish to attend.

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