About PersDig@UMD
The Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park has embarked on an ambitious Persian Digital Humanities initiative, the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities at the University of Maryland (PersDig@UMD). It is a collaborative effort involving Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and UMD libraries. We currently are developing three projects: the Persian Digital Library (PDL) (part of the multi-institutional Open Islamicate Texts Initiative), the Persian Manuscript Initiative (PMI), and the Lalehzar Digital Project (LDP).
Projects
Music courtesy of Ali Samadpour
In its final form, the Persian Digital Library (PDL) will be a revolutionary new educational and research resource that will provide free access to the most important works of Persian poetry and prose in a collaborative online environment. It will aggregate and align multiple manuscript, print, and artistic renditions of each text (including available translations) and provide the user with automatic (“clickable”) dictionary and morphological analysis of each word. Scholars will turn to the PDL for its metadata-enriched text files, high-quality manuscript images, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline, and new open-source, multi-text critical editions of Persian works. Students will use the PDL to improve their Persian language skills and master the art of reading medieval manuscripts. Scholars, students, and Persian literature aficionados from across the world will all collaborate through the platform’s collaborative workflows to add annotations and undertake new translations of the Persian classics. Much work, however, remains to been done to achieve this long-term goal.
With the help of start-up funds from a University of Maryland Tier 1 grant and a LaunchUMD campaign in the fall of 2015, we began this larger project during the 2015-2016 academic year by completing a PDL Pilot (more details on the PDL website). We are now preparing to launch the implementation stage of corpus building for the PDL, in collaboration with the KITAB Project of Aga Khan University (London) and the OpenArabic Project of Universität Leipzig. More details on this multi-institutional corpus-building initiative can be found at the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) website—an umbrella organization that PersDig@UMD co-founded with our esteemed partners from KITAB/Aga Khan University and OpenArabic/Universität Leipzig.
Persian Manuscript Initiative (PMI)
PersDig@UMD is a co-founder of the Persian Manuscript Initiative (PMI)—a multi-institutional initiative that will partner with leading libraries and archives around the world to help expand the number of Persian manuscripts available online and improve the quality of metadata we have for them. PMI will focus especially on preserving Persian manuscripts (both digitally and in their physical form) that may be at a risk of loss. In partnership with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) and local partners we have initiated projects in the Raja of Mahmudabad Palace Library (Lucknow, India) and the National Archive of Afghanistan (Kabul). Please see the PMI website for more details on all of these projects.
Lalehzar Digital Project (LDP)
The Lalehzar Digital Project (LDP) is a groundbreaking initiative and the hub of an international effort aimed at creating a multimedia archive of Tehran’s historic entertainment district, Lalehzar Street. Frequently compared to New York’s Broadway and Paris’s Champs-Élysées, between 1900 and 1979, Lalehzar Street was the heart of Tehran’s cosmopolitan cultural production and development of modern Iranian urban practices and sites of sociability: it hosted dozens of hotels, restaurants, cafés, publishing houses, theatrical and cinematic venues, and dancing halls alongside several mosques and chapels. Within close proximity of several major embassies, it was also a site for shopping and socialization for foreign residents and therefore functioned as a microcosm of diplomatic relations between Iran and the respective countries. Lalehzar was not merely a street but a vital cultural milieu of modern Iran: it was the birthplace of many modern Iranian performance genres (including those of political, popular, and/or artistic nature), venues and educational institutions, as well as Iran’s nightlife and entertainment industry. The LDP is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting a wide range of rare documents pertaining to the multiple urban, business, diplomatic, cultural and artistic aspects of Lalehzar. These include visual sources (such as maps, footage and photographs of the street, its venues, and performances), textual sources (including advertisements, brochures and theatrical scripts), and aural and oral sources including music pieces. This data then will ultimatley be augmented for further analysis, tracing, and visualization of the spatial and cultural transformations of the street and its venues between 1900 and 1979.
PersDig@UMD Team
Our Team at UMD
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Fatemeh Keshavarz
Director and Co-PI of PersDig@UMD
Director, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Director, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies
Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Studies -
Babak Hamidzadeh
Director and Co-PI of PersDig@UMD
Interim Dean of Libraries at University of Maryland, College Park
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Ahmet T. Karamustafa
Associate Director of PersDig@UMD
Associate Director for Academic Affairs, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies Professor of History
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Ali Reza Abasi
Associate Director of PersDig@UMD
Associate Professor of Persian University of Maryland, College Park
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Matthew Thomas Miller
Associate Director of PersDig@UMD
Assistant Professor of Persian Literature & Digital Humanities at University of Maryland, College Park
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Ida Meftahi
Director of Lalehzar Digital Project (LDP)
Roshan Institute Visiting Assistant Professor
Advisory Board Members
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Wali Ahmadi
Associate Professor of Persian Literature
University of California, Berkeley -
Devin Deweese
Professor, Central Eurasian Studies
Adjunct Professor, Religious Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington -
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Asghar Seyed Gohrab
Senior Lecturer at Leiden University
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Christiane Gruber
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Michigan
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Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
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Paul Losensky
Associate Professor, Central Eurasian Studies
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington -
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Farzaneh Milani
Raymond J. Nelson Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and former Director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia
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Elias Muhanna
Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University
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Roopika Risam
Assistant professor of English and Secondary English Education at Salem State University
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Omid Safi
Director, Duke Islamic Studies Center
Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC -
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Sunil Sharma
Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Boston University
Associate Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature -
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
Professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and the Chair of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto-Mississauga.
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Carl W. Ernst
William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Roshan Institute for Persian
Studies
1220 Jimenez Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
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