COBHUNI Lecture: Digitally accessing and processing manuscripts as objects, images and texts: Elements to consider when dealing with early Qur’anic fragmentsLecture by Dr. Alba Fedeli, University of Birmingham
13 October 2017

Photo: Alba Fedeli
COBHUNI Lecture on Friday, October 13 at 10 am c.t. in room 136, Edmund-Siemers-Allee
Digital images are fundamental in accessing almost unreadable manuscripts as special imaging enhances their destroyed underwriting. However, the digital dimension of our approach does not exclude a material involvement after the materiality of the objects, e.g. permissions, experimentations, cost of the imaging and copyright. The image processing can produce a hypothetical retracement of the underwriting of palimpsests that often generates discussions because of the manipulation of the images. The newly produced images are just an expedient to display an interpretation of the text despite the terminology that we are going to use (e.g. manipulation, processed images, and retracement). The digital edition of manuscripts - a digital documentary edition - can document the interpretation of the images and their text, tagging and encoding the manuscript and its text in categories that build and produce a searchable database. This work is time-consuming but relatively simple, if related to a single manuscript. In fact, the work is much more complex when we want to encode several manuscripts for comparing their texts (and physical features) to produce their phylogenetic analysis. In this case, the encoding of early Qur’anic manuscripts requires the development of categories that have to solve the limitations of the early writing system, adding the judgement of the scholar in the software analysis. How can we weigh and compare the explicit or ambiguous information of early manuscripts? As in the case of the image processing, we introduce the interpretation in our spreadsheet and digital work.
The paper will discuss components of digital access to manuscripts focusing on the images and edition of the Cambridge (Mingana-Lewis) Qur’anic palimpsest and giving some preliminary results from the establishment of a phylogenetic analysis of early Qur’anic manuscripts.