Syriaca.org is pleased to announce a new grant of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will enable Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University, and Marquette University to partner to continue preserving the history of Syriac culture in the Middle East.
“Linking Texts and Data from the Medieval Middle East: Next Generation Discovery and Access Tools for Syriac Cultural Heritage” is a collaborative digital project focused on making English translations of Syriac literature freely available online for students, scholars, and the interested public. The data published by this project will be added to Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal. The Syriaca.org digital collection has previously been funded by NEH grants received in 2012 and 2015.
Syriaca.org Director Daniel Schwartz (Texas A&M University) will lead the project in collaboration with Syriaca.org Assistant Director Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent (Marquette University) and General Editor David Michelson (Vanderbilt University). Winona Salesky serves as lead developer. Bryan Tarpley, Associate Research Scientist in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M, will provide software development for the Corpora Dataset Studio OCR/NER pipeline used on this project. Staff from Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries will provide technical expertise on curating linked open data. Clifford Anderson, Chief Digital Strategist, and Steven Baskauf, Data Science and Data Curation Specialist, will design a graph database built on Amazon Neptune. Undergraduate research assistants at Texas A&M and Vanderbilt, will gain experience in the digital preservation of cultural heritage. The Vanderbilt research group is directed by William Potter.
This innovative project uses data science to aggregate information and create software for preserving Syriac heritage. Specifically, the project will supplement the translation database with a Linked Data research tool designed by Vanderbilt University Libraries. The result will be a next-generation digital reference work featuring the rich poetry and history of Syriac culture. This project represents the longstanding collaboration between faculty and library staff to combine research excellence with expertise in both preservation and digital collections in the development of Srophé, a cultural heritage database platform. Anderson notes, “As librarians, we are excited to support…the preservation of this endangered cultural heritage by drawing on our developing expertise in scalable and sustainable linked data applications.”
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic once spoken widely by Christian communities in the medieval Middle East. The Syriac language today survives in use by minority populations in Iraq, Syria, and other countries in the region. Documents in Syriac are some of the most valuable historical sources for understanding the development and interaction of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These Syriac sources offer unique perspectives on the history of the Middle East from Roman and Byzantine times into the Islamic era and even up to the tumultuous present day in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. Syriaca.org’s digital collection is of value to more than just historians. War and political strife have disrupted traditional institutions of cultural memory and preservation for many in the Middle East. This project offers the Syriac diaspora communities a new means of access to information about their own identity and history. According to Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University David Michelson, “As the New Testament accounts make clear, some of the earliest Christian communities were Aramaic speaking. Until recently, however, the history of Syriac Christianity was rarely taught or studied in most universities in the English-speaking world. This project makes an online collection freely and conveniently available for research and teaching about Syriac in English. These resources will benefit all kinds of students and will be especially valuable to Syriac communities outside the Middle East who are seeking to share their unique heritage with future generations and the world.”