Event: “Beyond Digitization : the Emergence of Digital Manuscript Studies” (18 Dec | SOAS University of London)

Beyond Digitization : the Emergence of Digital Manuscript Studies

Manuscripts have been digitized by the thousands… but, now what?
Although many scholars have been making good use of digitized manuscripts
for ordinary philological purposes, there is much more that can be done with them.

In this talk, Dr Cornelis van Lit (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) will highlight some use cases, drawing from
his new book “Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World” (www.lwcvl.com/Among).

While Dr van Lit derives his examples from his own field of Islamic studies,
the same approach remains applicable to any research in the humanities, in which there is no access to the material manuscript, nor to the plain text, but only to images of text.
Dr van Lit will project us in a future, when we will not even depend anymore on the manuscript digital surrogates but merely want the data and metadata of those ‘born-digital manuscripts’.

Curious about the physical manuscripts themselves?

There will be an exclusive opportunity for the event’s attendees to view
a selection of the SOAS manuscripts from the Islamicate world
in the Library Special Collections Reading Room (SCRR, Level F) after the talk.
Places being limited, they will be attributed on first-come, first-served basis.
A sign-up sheet will be available on the day.

4.00pm-5.30pm, Wednesday 18 December 2019

Venue: Room RG01, SOAS University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG.

This lecture is free to attend but booking is required at  https://tinyurl.com/MSS-DH-VanLit-at-SOAS