The Digital Kalīla wa-Dimna: Digital Humanities and Digital Editions
Kalīla wa-Dimna is a text that is central to both Arabic and world literature. A collection of tales teaching political wisdom, it transcended languages, cultures, and religions. Throughout the centuries, the book travelled from India via the Middle East to Europe. In its course, it was translated from Sanskrit via Middle Persian and Arabic to Hebrew, Latin (under the title Directorium vitae humanae) and most European vernaculars, as well as Near Eastern, South Asian, and South-East Asian languages. Its religious and social context changed from Hinduism via Zoroastrianism to Islam, and from there to Christianity.
The work’s multilingual history involving circa forty languages has never been systematically studied. The absence of available research has made world literature ignore it, while scholars of Arabic avoided it because of its widely diverging manuscripts. AnonymClassic, an ERC-funded project at the Freie Universität Berlin, has been hard at work creating a digital edition of this complicated text with a massive manuscript tradition. In partnership with Columbia Global Centers | Amman, this series introduces the project to a broader audience through a keynote conversation and three consecutive academic workshops open to the public. All sessions will be recorded for publication via digital media.
Digital Humanities and Digital Editions
Register here
Monday, July 13 (4:00 pm Berlin, 5:00 pm Amman, 10:00 am New York)
Moderated by Matthew L. Keegan
The AnonymClassic Software and Digital Humanities
Mahmoud Kozae, Research Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin
On Small-Scale Digital Projects for Humanities Research
Theodore S. Beers, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin
Discussants:
Sarah Bowen Savant, Aga Khan University, Principal Investigator at the KITAB Project
Maxim Romanov, University of Vienna and Senior Research Fellow at the KITAB Project
This workshop will be followed by Q&A.
The AnonymClassic project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grand agreement No 742 635.