عنوان

Mixed Up by Time and Chance? Using Digital Methods to "Re-Orient" the Syriac Religious Literature of Late Antiquity

LA126136

انگلیسی

Mixed Up by Time and Chance? Using Digital Methods to "Re-Orient" the Syriac Religious Literature of Late Antiquity

[Article]

David A. Michelson

Leiden

Brill

The British Library's collection of approximately 1000 Syriac manuscripts is one of the world's richest collections of materials for the study of Syriac Christianity. These manuscripts were catalogued in the nineteenth century shortly after a large collection of over 500 manuscripts were acquired by the British from the monastery of Dayr al-Suryān in Egypt. This article examines the intellectual assumptions that guided the nineteenth-century cataloguing efforts and offers a methodological proposal for how a new digital catalogue of the manuscripts could and should differ. New methods of digital representation can permit users to engage the Dayr al-Suryān manuscripts and the whole of the British Library Syriac collection from multiple, varied, and even conflicting perspectives. Several such digital approaches are being implemented in Syriaca.org's digital catalogue of the British Library Syriac manuscripts. The diversity of such digital approaches promises to open new insights into the history of Christianity in late antiquity and beyond.

2016

136-182

Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture

5/1

2165-9214

British Library

British Museum

Codicology

Digital Humanities

Diverse Knowledges

Graph Databases

History of Christianity

Linked Open Data

Manuscripts

Orientalism

Postcolonial Studies

Religion & Society

Religious Studies

Social Sciences

Sociology of Religion

Syriaca.org

Traditional Cultural Expressions

David A. Michelson

10.1163/21659214-90000073

p

[Article]

275578

a

Y