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v0.1 of (*majallat*) *al-Muqtabas*
Volume 6 - We just released v0.1, the first proper release, of the journal al-Muqtabas. As per our release schedule this release includes the following: TEI files of all twelve issues of the sixth volume of al-Muqtabas with tructural mark-up of mastheads, sections, articles, and with page breaks linked to the facsimiles; MODS and BibTeX files for all issues, sections, and articles; Copies of TEI schema files from OpenAraPE_ODD; A local installation of the TEI Boilerplate for Arabic editions; all XSLT stylesheets necessary for various transformations from sources (shamela) and to other formats (md), for generating bibliographic metadata (MODS, BibTeX), for improving mark-up, linking page breaks to facsimiles, etc. Thanks to the efforts of CERN’s Zenodo platform we even got a DOI!
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v0.2 of (*majallat*) *al-Muqtabas*: volume 5
We just released v0.2 of the journal al-Muqtabas. This release includes structural mark-up and page breaks based on the digital facsimiles for volume 5. In addition, this release comprises all previously released files. vol. 5: complete vol. 6: complete I wish to express my gratitude to the following contributors, who helped with the mark-up of page breaks: Dimitar Dragnev: volume 5, issues 2 to 12
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The difficulty of establishing publication dates for books from late Ottoman *Bilād al-Shām*
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Essay published in edited volume 'Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies'
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Presentation of *Digital Muqtabas* at conference 'Books in Motion' in Beirut
I was invited to present Digital Muqtabas at the conference “Books in Motion: Exploring concepts of mobility in cross-cultural studies of the book” organised by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Hala Auji and James Hodapp (all AUB) that took place at AUB and OIB between 5-7 May 2016. The beautiful conference poster-cum-programme is available as PDF. My paper was titled: “Majallat al-Muqtabas between gray online libraries, large-scale scanning efforts, and programming tools: producing fully open, collaborative, and scholarly editions of early Arabic periodicals” and you can find the abstract below. It was part of a panel on digital remediation of the book on Saturday, 7 May, which I shared with David Wrisley (AUB) and Torsten Wollina (OIB). Torsten spoke on the challenges posed by the current state of digitization of books, manuscripts, and catelogues to researchers of the Islamicate world. David presented the fascinating results of course he taught on mapping Beirut’s publishing industry. The abstract to his paper is online as is the project website. As always, I have made the slides available on GitHub. Abstract Moving from the material to the seemingly immaterial, digitisation offers remedies for some of the Middle East’s most pressing issues when it comes to books as texts and cultural artifacts: protection, discovery, and access—particularly in times of war and iconoclasm, borders (between territories, linguistic communities, classes etc.), and highly dispersed audiences and artifacts. Yet, digitisation and the infrastructure to deliver digital artifacts is expensive and thus we have not a single scholarly digital edition of early...