This is the first part of a series of posts by the Digital Orientalist’s Syriac Studies Editor, Ephrem Ishac. This post acts as an introduction to Ishac’s interview with George A. Kiraz which will be serialized in later posts. In 1993, Sebastian Brock, the most prominent scholar of Syriac studies, wrote the following words in…
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The issue of multilingualism vs lingua franca in science (and in society) is certainly very complicated, but the recent article by Gregory Crane raises some questions and a few concerns. In general, I think everybody would agree with Miran’s appeal on Humanist: “Let us invest in language diversity”. There are countless documents supporting multilingualism in…
In the past year or so I have been seeing and hearing an increasing amount about the capabilities of Google Docs to transcribe scans in PDF format into editable documents. In the Digital Orientalist, Editor for Syriac Studies, Ephrem Ishac, has explained how to perform OCR on Syriac texts using Google Docs and Editor for…
In a piece that I wrote for the Digital Orientalist last year, I compiled a list of digital resources for Japanese palaeography that I had learned about and used through my involvement in the “Tackling Pandemics in Early Modern Japan” transcription project organized by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the AI platform Minna…
In a previous piece in the Digital Orientalist, Giulia Buriola went over geo-referencing examples in QGIS. Here I would like to introduce readers to another common geographic analysis software they might encounter on the market: ArcGIS, and show how this software might be applied to social scientific historical research. Readers may be familiar with this…
Are you skilled at designing visuals? Can you use PhotoShop or similar software? Do you want to improve your graphic design portfolio? Come and join The Digital Orientalist as its Graphic Design Manager! Read full post here.
There comes a time when using Word or PowerPoint or Excel is not going to be enough to create a visualization. There is simply too much to process or the envisioned result is too complex to do by hand. Then what? It’s time to learn a few more tricks. This is best done on something…
Voyant Tools is a popular website that offers a series of text analysis tools for examining word frequencies, patterns, and trends of a document. Although Voyant Tools supports analyzed documents in multiple languages, current tutorials and articles mainly focus on the application of Voyant Tools to English (Rockwell and Sinclair 2017). In this project, I…
My recent posts have focused on the biblical text and ways to access it online. Here I will turn to the material culture from the ancient environs in which the Bible developed. My focus is oriented more toward resources for digital publication and teaching. I will highlight a select few sites with great resources for…
Several months ago, some of my colleagues in Japan launched an online portal through which it is possible to explore from one’s own office the complex of the Mamluk sultan Qalawun (d. 1290), in Cairo (see: Qalawun VR Tour or the project’s site). In this post, I will present a brief overview of the portal…