Linking Texts and Data from the Medieval Middle East: Next-Generation Discovery and Access Tools for Syriac Cultural Heritage

FAIN: PW-290483-23

Texas A & M University, College Station (College Station, TX 77843-0001)
Daniel L. Schwartz (Project Director: July 2022 to present)
Bryan Tarpley (Co Project Director: May 2023 to present)

A project to expand data related to the primary sources included in Syraca.org, an online hub that hosts an advanced corpus of Syriac texts in translation, alongside contextual discovery tools. 

Linking Texts and Data from the Medieval Middle East enhances access to the literature and history of the Syriac cultural heritage community. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic once spoken widely in the Middle East and Asia. Syriac sources document critical moments in the interaction of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and offer unique perspectives on the history of the Middle East from Roman rule into the tumultuous present in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. This project will publish a corpus of Syriac literature in English translation, supported by open-source tools for automating the digitization, encoding, and markup of textual resources. The text corpus will be contextualized by integrating Linked Data from Syriaca.org, an online reference hub for studying the Syriac world. The result will be a next-generation digital reference tool enhancing discovery of and access to Syriac cultural heritage aimed at non-specialists, students, members of the Syriac heritage communities, and the public.