Periodic Reporting for period 3 - GO.LOCAL (Going Local in the Perso-Islamic Lands: Afghan Geniza, Islamisation and Language in the pre-Mongol Islamic East)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-06-01 bis 2024-11-30
Today, in the popular imagination, the vast and pivotal region that stretches from eastern Iran to Tibet, known to some as the Islamicate East, is notorious as the cradle of terrorism, violence, and war. And yet, the region witnessed a mixing of cultures since antiquity that was both unique and extraordinarily influential on neighbouring societies. Invisible East is the first single, coherent research programme dedicated to the study of the Islamicate East.
Supported by an advisory board of the most distinguished scholars in the field worldwide, a team of Go.Local researchers based at the University of Oxford is led by the PI, Dr Arezou Azad.
Go.Local is part of the Invisible East programme led by the PI Arezou Azad which fills major gaps in research on the Islamicate East, notably on the social, cultural, and documentary history of the region based on evidence from a variety of Iranian and Arabic language sources.
Until now, most historical accounts have told us about life at royal and sultanic courts and provided little information on the lives of ordinary people. Go.Local also sheds a light on the private and public lives of ordinary people: cobblers, artists, policemen, farmers, women, children, etc; on what they ate, whose orders they followed, how they paid their taxes, and much more. For the first time, we can reconstruct evidence-based social history from the grassroots.
The team works on a set of 500-1,000 documents written in seven languages and six scripts across the eastern Islamicate world in the medieval period. These documents are now becoming known to the academic and non-academic worlds, largely because many have only become publicly available in the past five to ten years. Of these, the Persian documents are the newest and most extraordinary as they make up the largest set of the earliest Persian original writing in the world.
After a rigorous team-based quality control process, with input from disciplinary and subject specialists around the world, the team codes each document in digital format to ultimately make it available through an online, open-access database.
The research goals are broadly threefold:
1. To understand the roles played by political, religious, legal, and financial stakeholders in the construction of multicultural communities and societies across the Islamicate East;
2. To ascertain how texts and material culture help us understand relations between Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, and adherents of other faiths in the Islamicate East; and
3. To establish how the Persian language developed and interacted with other languages, such as, Arabic and Hebrew, in the multicultural Islamicate East.
Supported by an advisory board of the most distinguished scholars in the field worldwide, a team of Go.Local researchers based at the University of Oxford is led by the PI, Dr Arezou Azad.
Go.Local is part of the Invisible East programme led by the PI Arezou Azad which fills major gaps in research on the Islamicate East, notably on the social, cultural, and documentary history of the region based on evidence from a variety of Iranian and Arabic language sources.
Until now, most historical accounts have told us about life at royal and sultanic courts and provided little information on the lives of ordinary people. Go.Local also sheds a light on the private and public lives of ordinary people: cobblers, artists, policemen, farmers, women, children, etc; on what they ate, whose orders they followed, how they paid their taxes, and much more. For the first time, we can reconstruct evidence-based social history from the grassroots.
The team works on a set of 500-1,000 documents written in seven languages and six scripts across the eastern Islamicate world in the medieval period. These documents are now becoming known to the academic and non-academic worlds, largely because many have only become publicly available in the past five to ten years. Of these, the Persian documents are the newest and most extraordinary as they make up the largest set of the earliest Persian original writing in the world.
After a rigorous team-based quality control process, with input from disciplinary and subject specialists around the world, the team codes each document in digital format to ultimately make it available through an online, open-access database.
The research goals are broadly threefold:
1. To understand the roles played by political, religious, legal, and financial stakeholders in the construction of multicultural communities and societies across the Islamicate East;
2. To ascertain how texts and material culture help us understand relations between Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, and adherents of other faiths in the Islamicate East; and
3. To establish how the Persian language developed and interacted with other languages, such as, Arabic and Hebrew, in the multicultural Islamicate East.
1. Raw data production: created a working system to generate raw data on eastern Islamicate documents and local texts in 7 languages and 6 scripts. Have so far gathered high resolution images of 500 documents with reproduction rights, and produced Document Management Sheets (with transliteration, translation into English and commentary) for 120 documents.
2. Digital corpus: A digitisation template has been created and is being applied by our team of student encoders. The template uses Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tag sets and rules, and the application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to encode texts. TEI tags describe the structural hierarchies, divisions, and characteristics of a given document. A web developing company has been commissioned to create the frontend for the corpus to enable searchability and user-friendly visibility.
3. Research tool creation and dissemination: The team has produced a number of key research tools that are available on the project’s website (invisibleeast.web.ox.ac.uk) which acts as repository of tools, blogs, publications, and activities of the programme:
• Storymap of all the documents the project works on;
• Digital timeline of the earliest New Persian writing;
• Inventories of documents in seven languages with meta-data and tags;
• Guide to deciphering the oldest Persian handwriting (palaeography);
4. Publications: 2 articles/book chapters are out; and 4 articles are in their final stages of publication. Edited volumes and final monograph to be published through a dedicated books series with Edinburgh University Press (under contract).
5. For mainly academic audiences: organised two major international conferences, and two text reading colloquia with high-quality presenters and participants from around the world. Also organised others guest lectures and seminars, in-person and virtual, during the pandemic (ca. 20).
6. Organised public webinars for the general public and academics.
7. For secondary school children aged 11-14, organised outreach sessions in 4 UK schools and 2 schools in Afghanistan.
8. Developed a new course for undergraduates and graduates at Oxford on Iranian-language documents.
2. Digital corpus: A digitisation template has been created and is being applied by our team of student encoders. The template uses Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tag sets and rules, and the application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to encode texts. TEI tags describe the structural hierarchies, divisions, and characteristics of a given document. A web developing company has been commissioned to create the frontend for the corpus to enable searchability and user-friendly visibility.
3. Research tool creation and dissemination: The team has produced a number of key research tools that are available on the project’s website (invisibleeast.web.ox.ac.uk) which acts as repository of tools, blogs, publications, and activities of the programme:
• Storymap of all the documents the project works on;
• Digital timeline of the earliest New Persian writing;
• Inventories of documents in seven languages with meta-data and tags;
• Guide to deciphering the oldest Persian handwriting (palaeography);
4. Publications: 2 articles/book chapters are out; and 4 articles are in their final stages of publication. Edited volumes and final monograph to be published through a dedicated books series with Edinburgh University Press (under contract).
5. For mainly academic audiences: organised two major international conferences, and two text reading colloquia with high-quality presenters and participants from around the world. Also organised others guest lectures and seminars, in-person and virtual, during the pandemic (ca. 20).
6. Organised public webinars for the general public and academics.
7. For secondary school children aged 11-14, organised outreach sessions in 4 UK schools and 2 schools in Afghanistan.
8. Developed a new course for undergraduates and graduates at Oxford on Iranian-language documents.
The project has launched Iranian-language documents into the discipline of documentary research and the history of the medieval eastern Islamicate world into the fields Islamic history and Iranology. By the end of the project, when the digital corpus website is set up an publicly available and when the volumes and books are published, it will consolidate these paradigmatic and disciplinary shifts.