HUNAYNNET is a doubly interdisciplinary undertaking, i.e. both within the humanities and in the crossing between the humanities and the digital world, an approach which we definitely see as the optimal way to shed light upon our subject matter.
The project website provides free access to the corpus of texts that are available in two formats, the Reading Interface and the linguistic Parallel Corpus. The corpus includes the works of Porphyry, Aristotle,Galen, Hippocrates and Euclid for which there are both Syriac and Arabic versions.
The same texts are also available at the Parallel Corpus: the texts are imported into an open-source corpus management system, NoSketchEngine (NoSkE), an open-source corpus management tool designed especially for the linguistic study of text corpora. The texts were enriched with the standard set of linguistic annotation: tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis. For Greek and Arabic, this is accomplished automatically, with some challenges to be overcome. For Syriac, the annotation is manual with challenges of its own, determined by the technical nature of the texts. The annotated data is currently being used for the development of an automated morphological analyzer/lemmatizer and part-of-speech tagger, as well as to for the lexical and authorship analysis.
A few more texts are now in the final stage of preparation and will be added to the corpus as soon as they are ready.
The scientific methodology used for preparation of the corpus was presented in the publications authored by the project members (Arnzen/Arzhanov/Bamballi/Čéplö/Kessel 2018, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2537032; Arnzen/Arzhanov/Bamballi/Čéplö/Kessel 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4382407).
In a series of articles “Field Notes on Syriac Manuscripts” the team members presented several previously unknown Syriac scientific manuscripts containing both original Syriac medical and philosophical works as well as translations from the Greek (Kessel 2017, DOI: 10.1163/2212943X-00503015 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2527016; Kessel 2017; Kessel/Bamballi 2018, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2527030; Kessel/Arzhanov 2020, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4382349). All these manuscripts are kept in the Middle Eastern collections and have recently become available thanks to the digitization campaign of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (Collegeville, MN).
The team members have prepared updated surveys of scientific Syriac works, including both translations of the Greek medical and philosophic writings and original Syriac compositions (Kessel 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2527034; Kessel 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4382450; Arzhanov 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5708617).