Syriaca.org editors David A. Michelson and William L. Potter gave a joint presentation, “Integrating Manuscript Description and Knowledge Graphs: New Digital Models from Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library (bl.syriac.uk)” as part of the 17th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age hosted by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Syriac is a medieval dialect of Aramaic that flourished in both the Roman and Sassanian Empires. Texts in Syriac comprise one of the largest corpora from the period of Late Antiquity (circa fourth through seventh centuries C.E.). With over 1000 items, the Syriac manuscript collection of the British Library has shaped Western scholarship on Syriac more than any other collection. This influence can be attributed both to the richness of the holdings and to the fact that since 1870 the collection has been discoverable through a highly detailed catalog written by William Wright.

The abstract for the talk is as follows:

Integrating Manuscript Description and Knowledge Graphs: New Digital Models from Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library (bl.syriac.uk)

David A. Michelson and William L. Potter, Vanderbilt University

After a century and a half, however, a digital finding aid for the collection is an urgent desideratum. Over the last decade, Syriaca.org (a digital scholarly collaboration) has worked to create authority file infrastructure on which to base a new catalog. As an incremental step toward full re-cataloguing, Syriaca.org has just published Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library: A New Digital Edition of Wright’s Catalog (Michelson and Potter, 2024, bl.syriac.uk). This paper describes the intellectual models developed as part of this digital finding aid.

The project offers three areas for new insight into digital manuscript description. First, because the description of Syriac manuscripts requires an unusual level of domain specific expertise, the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library project resulted in a unique style of collaboration between historians of Syriac literature and librarians. This model is already proving to be useful for manuscript description in similarly under-studied fields (such as Ethiopic, Coptic, etc.). Second, because the project was designed to meet the demands of both historians and librarians, the resulting data model combines standard codicological description with emerging digital humanities use of linked data graphs. This data structure is a promising trajectory for the digital description of manuscripts. Lastly, although the base dataset was a printed catalog, the digital version has proved to be more than the sum of its parts. The project design intentionally sought to overcome some of the inherent limitations of the source catalog including its hierarchical arrangement and the biases associated with its nineteenth-century audience.