Future Philology: Digitization and Beyond

Future Philology: Digitization and Beyond lead image

Future Philology: Digitization and Beyond, University of Oxford Online, September 30–October 1, 2021

A Two-day Online Symposium organised by the Invisible East Programme, University of Oxford.

At present, philology--the old art of reading slowly and carefully--is reinventing itself to become a discipline equipped with database technology. Scholars are setting up digital corpora of documents and manuscripts of various periods and regions.

These digital corpora not only made precious historical sources much more accessible to academia, but also opened up new avenues of research on their content as well as their materiality.

The Invisible East Programme at Oxford University is contributing to this field by creating, for the first time, a multilingual digital corpus of documents from the pre-Mongol Islamicate East. This region includes Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, in which documents were written in, inter alia, (Judeo-)Persian, Arabic, Middle Persian, Bactrian, Sogdian, and Khotanese. We are now inviting scholars working on databases of documents from the ancient and medieval world to share their experiences and insights.

PROGRAM

Advance registration required.