series of lectures called the digital classicist seminar in Berlin and we have opened the call
for papers and I invite you all to participate and to put in some content because we would
like to establish a big digital classicist center as well in Berlin and we are very strong
connected with King's College in London. So pick up a leaflet and I wait for your applications.
What I will do now is I will put some, I have no PowerPoint presentation. I have two
parts of my speech. In the first part I will tell you about the background of the project
and then I will show you what we have done out of it. It is because the methods we used
for bringing them online, for bringing the digital content online is very strongly connected
to the methods which we use in the specific scholarship, so Orientalism and Quranic studies.
The project, Corpus Quranicum, it began in 2007 and it is a long-term project in the
academy and during the application they put emphasis on the printed or on a book edition
and not on a digital edition or publication. So when we came into contact with the Corpus
Quranicum, me as part of TLOTR, we are a working group called the Electronic Life of
the Academy and we support the various projects in the academy for putting their content online.
There we said, okay, we have the possibility to bring them online, so what can we do? But
we had to take into account the way they wanted to publish first and you will see it afterwards
in the website how we try to transfer the analog way of publication to the digital way.
Just to give you a short example, the commentaries on the Sura, they were written in Word and
they had no idea or no chance to write them in XML or any other format and so we had to
transfer them to XML. I was told that not many of you might know in deep the story of the
Qur'an, so I will start my talk with giving you some theoretical and background about how the
Qur'an or what questions research can put into the Qur'an. And keep in mind that this is the
methodological and theoretical background and it does not originate within the fields of the
digital humanities but it comes from the Qur'anic studies themselves. The discipline it serves, it
gives the theoretical background while the digital aspect reflects and adopts the background. There
is a fruitful dialogue between the technique, theory and action leading to further knowledge
and bringing light to the successful development of a religion in the late antiquity within a
special landscape populated by various communities emerged. The Qur'an is the holy book of the
latest of the successful monotheistic religions, the Islam. How did the Qur'an emerge? The herald
of the Qur'an was Muhammad who received God's words over a period of 20 years. Muhammad was
born in 550 after Christ. In 610 he came to Mecca and began teaching publicly. In the year 622 he
was forced into exile to the region of Medina. For the next 10 years he continued his work and his
teaching spread throughout the Arabic Peninsula. He died in Medina in 632. The genesis of the Qur'an
occurred within these 22 years. When he died, the Qur'an as a collection of texts, the 140
surahs, existed but not as a written book. The formal gestait of the surah still testifies to
the function as an oral announcement. Just to give you an example.
Okay, so it is important for you to know that the tradition of the Qur'an, it was mainly oral. So
this is one leg of the Qur'an. It is the oral tradition. The other tradition is the tradition
we can find in materials, in manuscripts. Because within these 20 years the community of listeners
grew and the delineation from other religions on the Arabic Peninsula took place. The Qur'an is
thus a valuable testimony to the late antiquity with references to other monovitalistic religions
and early Arabic poetry, as well as Arabic inscriptions, the intertextuality. The exile
of 622 changed the community of the listeners from the paganian followers of local cults to
eruditut Christians and traditional Jews in Medina. The discussion with these communities
is documented in the Qur'an itself. The Qur'an development was thus intertwined with dialogue
and interaction with other religions distributed on the Arabic Peninsula. We cannot take the Qur'an
as a book, the kitab as a fate incomplete, but more as a chronological growing collection of. The
form of the announcement is the surah, a text unit that consists of different elements like
addresses, prayers, hymns and stories. The first handwritten testimonies, and now we come to the
materials, date from the late 17th and 7th century. The today widely used printed edition from Egypt,
1925, follows the vocalization. The early Arabic writing system didn't know vocals in the tradition
of Hafzafafzim, based on the so-called automatic consonant text dated in the 50s of the 7th century.
I will conclude the background introduction to the website of the Copa's Qur'anic project with the
emphasis of a very special module of the project. In the 1920s, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
implemented a plan to assemble a complete collection of the eldest Qur'anic manuscripts.
Gotilf Bergstrasse traveled equipped with a camera through different countries and
photographed manuscripts. After Bergstrasse's death in 1934, Otto Pretzel continued his plan with the
goal of an apparatus criticus in the Quran until his death in 1944, which ended this project. In
2007, members of our project found the 450 aquifer film roles and recordings on wax in a closet in the
Bavarian Academy. We have begun to digitize these film roles and to make them available for further
analysis. Today, most of these manuscripts are lost or disparate in other libraries. So let's switch
shortly to the website. On the left side, the central entry point is the Sura and you can select a Sura and a
Vous. Let's see what I have selected. Wait, I want to select 25 and the first 32. So what we get on the left side
here is the Arabic text. For the personal improvement or for the improvement of the display of the text, we
offer a font, the Qur'anic, for free download. It has some improvements with Arabic scripts and with other elder
scripts like Ethiopian or Syrian. In the middle page, you see the printed edition of 1925. So switching to the
manuscripts documentation, you see here the scans of manuscripts which we have got the right to display them. And as well, I
wonder if I... Yeah, I think so. And here we have, for example, an example of these photographs. You can click on it and
then you can, via digilip, you can mark regions, you can make citations and stuff like this. The next module is the
Les'at and L'Exiones. As I said, it's more an oral tradition of the Qur'an and this is what we want to document here. So you have
the whole verse and you have the different readings of the Qur'an down under. Thus, coming to the intertextuality of the
Qur'an, you can find here, if there is, it isn't at the moment, we are still in the beta phase and we still try to put in more
content, but we can select another verse. And here we see the references which can be found in the Qur'an, so the discussion which took
place during the formation of the Qur'an. The last component of our module or of our landscape of the Qur'an are the commentaries. Thus, we have
here a new translation of the Sura. We have the dating and we have a literary critics. Some of them are still in work and will be underdone. I will have a look what...
In the Sura 97, I can show you what we did there. Then I'm done. So we have here the rich commentary with the dating, scholarly work. So it's much more content than
digital humanities, but it's more humanities than digital, maybe one might say. We have the text, we have a Cusorian commentary here down under and we have some notes on the Qur'an and as well much interlinking with other sections of the text. We have here the literary critics where the text or the Sura is identified or analyzed with literary methods.
And last, we have the content and how the Sura is structured. And here we see, for example, that verse 1-5 is an often-badung speech dating announcement and improvement of announcement. So that's what I wanted to show you. We are still working on the project. As you have seen, we have here a better, but I'm sure that we will never leave this better because the content is growing.
We will put in more content. We will put in more analysis. For example, we want to implement some morphological or linguistic techniques which are developed within another project we have with Wissenspijer. You might have seen the poster. And so we keep on working and come back maybe and see the site. Thank you very much.