Simon Daisley is an independent researcher of Kalmyk Buddhism and a digital heritage practitioner based in New Zealand. Through a personal interest in Buddhism, particularly in the history of Buddhism in the Russian Empire and among the Kalmyk people, Daisley has been researching Kalmyk Buddhist monasteries (khuruls), especially those that were destroyed in the Soviet […]
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 early 2021, a new platform, Digital Ottoman Studies (DOS), was established with the aim of contributing to digital humanities from the perspective of Ottoman Empire and Turkish studies. The Istanbul-based project facilitates data access for researchers by collecting projects, archives, databases, manuscript collections, events, and more through an English and Turkish-language website. The platform […]
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 […]
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 […]
In a previous post I briefly presented some of the richest and most commonly used online resources for Korean Studies. There I suggested that despite the plethora of premodern textual material that is freely available online, it remained to be seen what kind of digital humanities work scholars of Korea would be able to produce. Many factors […]
Sometimes it takes days or even weeks to be able to read and decipher a word in manuscripts. This problem, which can be experienced in every language, is a problem frequently encountered by Ottoman historians in the process of reading words in Ottoman Turkish manuscripts. At this point, LexiQamus, an online resource that makes it […]
The North China Railway Archive (華北交通アーカイブ) is an online database of digitized stock photographs illustrating life under Japanese occupation in interwar North China. It contains more than 39,000 photographs taken in various parts of North China between 1939 and 1945 commissioned by the North China Transportation Company (J. Kahoku Kōtsū Kabushiki Gaisha 華北交通株式会社) for promotional […]
This year I have had the pleasure of being involved in the “Tackling Pandemics in Early Modern Japan” transcription project organized by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the AI platform Minna de honkoku みんなで翻刻. During the project, participants have been posting resources useful for engaging with historical Japanese documents and cursive Japanese to […]
As a scholar who has spent nearly a decade working on a variety of digital humanities projects, my contributions to the Digital Orientalist present an opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned through working and teaching in the field. Largely self-taught, I have had plenty of experience of building things that don’t work, or […]
