On June 14, 2023, Noam Maeir, PhD candidate in Comparative Religion and Digital Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, presented “Excerpting Practices in Syriac Literary Culture of Late Antiquity: A Computational Analysis of the British Library’s Digitized Catalog of Syriac Manuscripts” at the 2023 North American Syriac Symposium. Noam presented his quantitative analyses of Syriac excerpting practices utilizing data from Syriaca.org’s in-progress “The Digital Wright: A Database of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library“. A summary of Noam’s presentation follows.
William Wright’s Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since the year 1838 (London: British Museum, 1870-1872), contains detailed descriptions of one of the largest collections of pre-modern Syriac manuscripts (approximately 1,000 manuscripts), providing invaluable historical, linguistic and literary information about the collection now held in the British Library. Remarkably, the systematic descriptions provided in the BL catalog has yet to be matched, and as such, Wright’s Catalogue still serves as an important resource for scholars of Syriac studies. Thanks to the full digitization of the Catalogue (“The Digital Wright: A Database of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library,” edited by David Michelson and William Potter), the wealth of information contained in the catalog is now available for systematic and thorough analyses, in ways that have not been tangible before. In this short post I would like to showcase how I used the data provided by the digitized BL catalog for the purposes of my study. In my research, I seek to offer diachronic and quantitative analyses of Syriac excerpting practices, within the general framework provided by “new philology”, at the heart of which is the study of non-authorial literary practices, such as excerpting.
With Syriaca.org’s systematic digitization of Wright’s Catalogue, each textual item – an extract or an excerpt – included in the Catalogue has been tagged, and as such, can now be computationally manipulated. What this means is that I could re-arrange the data in the Catalogue in order to produce a data set that represents the excerpting practices in the British Library manuscript collection – via a quantitative measurement of the number of excerpts per manuscript, each excerpt representing a single act of (scribal) literary selection. Applying a diachronic analysis to this data, I then proceed to characterize the excerpting practices of the manuscripts in the Catalogue, based on their association with the specific genres assigned by Wright, as well as overall practices, regardless of genre affiliation.
The results of the analysis enable us to chart the historical progression of excerpting practices found in the British Library collection. Interestingly, we can identify various excerpting peaks and lows (seen overall and specifically within each genre), and even cross-genre relationships (e.g., a relationship between excerpting practices in liturgical and hagiographic manuscripts). Nevertheless, for me, more than anything else, the results demonstrate the richness and subtle sophistication of the literature, knowledge, and identity-making practices expressed in the pre-modern Syriac literary and manuscript cultures.