GU4021: From Codex to eBook: Transmission of Text and Idea in the Islamic World | E. Van Dalen

Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Graduate and Undergraduate Seminar
W 10:10AM-2PM

Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts available in libraries and archives today have an intricate history of production, transmission and reception. This class will provide both the understanding of that history and the philological skills to work with the texts. This course will ask how groups worked together to shape the textual history of the Islamic world and how technological innovations influenced reading and authorship practices, attitudes towards orality versus textuality, notions of originality and authority, and ways of knowledge transfer. We will also consider the reproduction and reception of texts through practices of translation, citation, and commentary and ways to study intertextuality.

A section of the course will offer an introduction to codicology and palaeography, in which we will study the diversity of Islamicate scripts and manuscript materials. We will also study methods of textual criticism to learn how to produce and engage with critical (digital) editions. Finally, we will consider issues of digitization, such as optical character recognition and corpus linguistics. By the end of the course, students will have gained insight into the fields of book history, philology, textual criticism, translation and social history of reading and writing practices in the Islamic world.

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