Syriaca.org editor Nathan Gibson will present “A Guide to Syriaca.org Reference Tools and Desiderata for Central and East Asia” at the 5th International Conference on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia: June 19-22, 2016, Universität Salzburg (Austria).
Persons, places, and hagiographic works relevant to Central and East Asia may be found here: http://syriaca.org/blog/central-east-asia/.
An abstract of the paper is as follows:
Syriaca.org publishes online reference works about places, persons, texts, and events relating to the Syriac communities. As an open-access platform that interfaces with a variety of other online resources (including library catalogues, manuscript repositories, bibliographic databases, and other digital humanities projects), it has the potential to serve as a hub for Syriac scholarship that includes Central and East Asia. However, the data relating to these regions need more development. The present paper will consist of two parts:
- a walkthrough of both published and pre-publication Syriaca.org reference tools; and
- a discussion of the desiderata for Central and East Asia, including the specific ways that Syriac scholars working on these regions can benefit from and contribute their research to these reference works.
The editors are, in turn, interested in feedback from the conference participants on the most useful directions for developing reference information relating to Central and East Asia.