OpenITI has begun piloting the production of the first digital publications of Persian and Arabic works, taken straight from their original manuscript form into a digital publication without a print intermediary.
We are developing two projects in collaboration with Carl Ernst for our digital publication pipeline.
The first project is a collaboration with Carl Ernst, Mbaye Lo, and graduate students from their seminar on ʿUmar ibn Sayyid, in which they all worked with us on encoding his writings–previously found only in manuscript form–in OpenITI mARkdown MSS.1 All texts from this project are available here.
A sample digital edition of the ‘Umar ibn Sa’id text on the web and its corresponding manuscript page.
The second project is another collaborative effort with Carl Ernst. In this project, we have focused on producing three scholarly editions of Indo-Persian manuscripts that Dr. Ernst had previously transcribed in plaintext format. John Mullan, digital specialist on the OpenITI AOCP team, worked with him on encoding them in the OpenITI mARkdown schema. These texts can be found here.
A sample digital edition from a page of a Persian treatise with its corresponding manuscript page.
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ʿUmar ibn Sayyid’s name is often romanized as ʿUmar ibn Saʿīd. In these manuscripts, he wrote his name as “عمر بن سيد,” i.e., the former spelling. This is reflected in the OpenITI URI for his name, 1280CumarIbnSayyid. ↩