International workshop on lemmatisation and morphological analysis of Syriac texts, University of Manchester, May 31, 2017

AHRC-funded project ‘The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: Galen's On Simple Drugs and the Recovery of Lost Texts through Sophisticated Imaging Techniques’ (University of Manchester) and ERCfunded project ‘Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic’ (Austrian Academy of Sciences) co-organize a workshop on automated methods of lemmatization, morphological analysis and other types of annotations and mark-ups of Syriac texts.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in digital editions, creation of corpora of Syriac texts and, more broadly, computer-assisted analysis of Syriac. However, the basic tools indispensable for any such initiative are for the most part not available. In that respect the field of Syriac Studies is currently at a considerable disadvantage in comparison with the Greek, Arabic or Hebrew Studies, to name just a few related fields. This underdevelopment has severe repercussions not only for electronic editions but also for such areas as Syriac linguistics and lexicography.

Whereas a pioneering conference on Syriac and the Digital Humanities (Rutgers University, 2015) clearly demonstrated the general scholarly demand for provision of electronic infrastructure for Syriac, the workshop is going to bring together scholars either developing electronic tools and corpus software for Syriac or using already available tools for their projects. We hope that the workshop will promote exchange of ideas and foster collaboration among scholars.

Invited Speakers
George Kiraz (Beth Mardutho; Rutgers University)
Bastien Kindt (Université catholique de Louvain)
Wido van Peursen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Organizing Committee
Peter E. Pormann
Grigory Kessel
Naïma Afif