#MAKTABA SHAMELA FOR MAC FULL#
The purpose and scope of the project is to provide an open, collaborative, referencable, and scholarly digital edition of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas, which includes the full text, semantic mark-up, bibliographic metadata, and digital imagery.
#MAKTABA SHAMELA FOR MAC CODE#
Finally, by sharing all our code (mostly XSLT) in addition to the XML files, we hope to facilitate similar projects and digital editions of further periodicals, namely Rashīd Riḍā’s al-Manār.
1 The web-display is implemented through a customised adaptation of the TEI Boilerplate XSLT stylesheets it can be downloaded, distributed and run locally without any internet connection-a necessity for societies outside the global North. Editions will be referencable down to the word level for scholarly citations, annotation layers, as well as web-applications through a documented URI scheme. Improvements of the transcription and mark-up can be crowd-sourced with clear attribution of authorship and version control using.
The digital edition (TEI XML and a basic web display) is then hosted as a GitHub repository with a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.īy linking images to the digital text, every reader can validate the quality of the transcription against the original, thus overcoming the greatest limitation of crowd-sourced or gray transcriptions and the main source of disciplinary contempt among historians and scholars of the Middle East.
#MAKTABA SHAMELA FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
With the GitHub-hosted TEI edition of Majallat al-Muqtabas we want to show that through re-purposing available and well-established open software and by bridging the gap between immensely popular, but non-academic (and, at least under US copyright laws, occasionally illegal) online libraries of volunteers and academic scanning efforts as well as editorial expertise, one can produce scholarly editions that remedy the short-comings of either world with very little funding: We use digital texts from, transform them into TEI XML, add light structural mark-up for articles, sections, authors, and bibliographic metadata, and link them to facsimiles provided through the British Library’s “Endangered Archives Programme” and HathiTrust (in the process of which we also make first corrections to the transcription). In addition, these gray “editions” lack information linking the digital representation to material originals, namely bibliographic meta-data and page breaks, which makes them almost impossible to employ for scholarly research. But some of the best-funded scanning projects, such as Hathitrust, produced digital imagery of numerous Arabic periodicals, while gray online-libraries of Arabic literature, namely, provide access to a vast body of Arabic texts including transcriptions of unknown provenance, editorial principals, and quality for some of the mentioned periodicals. Consequently, we still have not a single digital scholarly edition of any of these journals. Yet despite of their cultural significance and unlike for valuable manuscripts and high-brow literature, funds for transcribing the tens to hundreds of thousands of pages of an average mundane periodical are simply not available. Due to the state of Arabic OCR and the particular difficulties of low-quality fonts, inks, and paper employed at the turn of the twentieth century, they can only be digitised by human transcription. They might also be the only resolve for future education and rebuilding efforts once the wars in Syria, Iraq or Yemen come to an end.Įarly Arabic periodicals, such as Butrus al-Bustānī’s al-Jinān (Beirut, 1876–86), Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf, Fāris Nimr, and Shāhīn Makāriyūs’ al-Muqtaṭaf (Beirut and Cairo, 1876–1952), Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s al-Muqtabas (Cairo and Damascus, 1906–16) or Rashīd Riḍā’s al-Manār (Cairo, 1898–1941) are at the core of the Arabic renaissance ( al-nahḍa), Arab nationalism, and the Islamic reform movement. In the context of the current onslaught cultural artifacts in the Middle East face from the iconoclasts of the Islamic State, from the institutional neglect of states and elites, and from poverty and war, digital preservation efforts promise some relief as well as potential counter narratives. Note: This text was copied from the read me of our edition of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas and is in urgent need of updating.
0 kommentar(er)
