Matthew Thomas Miller

The Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project will significantly improve the accuracy of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts by developing a collation tool to automatically create large amounts of training data from existing digital texts and manuscript images without time-consuming human annotation of individual manuscripts. The ACDC project will accomplish this task by extending the capabilities of the text alignment tool passim and the HTR engine Kraken to align very poor initial HTR transcriptions of diverse manuscript exemplars with existing digital texts in order to automatically produce training data in a “distantly supervised” manner. The ACDC tool’s acceleration of the training data production process will enable, for the first time, the creation of generalizable Arabic and Persian HTR models required for the digital transcription of large-scale Persian and Arabic manuscript collections.

OpenITI AOCP is a multi-institutional initiative led by a highly interdisciplinary team of humanities, computer science, and digital humanities principal investigators from Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (Roshan-UMD); Northeastern University’s (NU) NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (London) (AKU-ISMC); the Department of History, University of Vienna; and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, UMD (MITH-UMD). OpenITI AOCP proposes to address the technical and organizational barriers currently stymying the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production in a three-stream work plan. OpenITI AOCP’s technical work (workstream #1) will focus on integrating standards-compliant text export functionality (e.g., TEI XML) and the latest advancements in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing with eScriptorium (an open-source and user-friendly OCR pipeline). This work will result in a robust digital text production pipeline for Arabic-script languages that will enable researchers, students, and citizen scientists to produce high-quality, open-access, and standards-compliant digital texts in a user-friendly environment for the first time. OpenITI AOCP team will also build digital capacity in the field of Islamicate Studies and cultivate networks of OCR researchers and interested users through a combination of experts workshops, biannual teleconferences, and pedagogical materials—efforts that will both improve the quality of AOCP’s final deliverables and expand their community of users.

The carnivalesque poetics of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval Sufi poetry have excited the interest of varied audiences since premodern times. This attention is not surprising: these poems' purported celebration of proscribed actions, antinomian figures, and even apostasy shocks readers and demands interpretation. Many Sufi interpreters, followed by a substantial group of contemporary scholars, have read the carnivalesque imagery of such poetry as an esoteric symbolic code that must be explicated through the Sufi hermeneutic tradition. Other scholars, largely approaching these poems from the perspective of the history of Sufism, have sought to understand this poetry’s relationship with the historical antinomian groups of the medieval Islamic world. What has been lost in these discussions, however, is an understanding of the qalandariyyāt’s poetics and its function within the larger early Persian genre system. This study focuses on elucidating the “poetics of the Sufi carnival” through an exploration of how the qalandariyyāt constructs its heterotopic poetics in its parody of ascetic-homiletic (zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa) and panegyric (madḥiyyāt) poetry. The qalandariyyāt operates as a countergenre, but not in the singular. Subsumed under this broad generic umbrella are multiple subgenres—a point that also illustrates the considerable complexity and historical specificity of the early Persian genre system.

Historical treatments of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval Persian poetry typically identify their origin in the Sufi poetry of Bābā Tāher, Abu Saʿid, and Sanāʾi and portray them as a poetic instantiation of the intellectual and antinomian critiques of the formalistic modes of piety practiced in the increasingly powerful institutionalized Sufi orders. However, the qalandari panegyrics of the Saljuq court poets Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi—arguably the earliest datable examples of this poetry—analyzed in this article complicate this narrative. They utilize the heterotopic poetics of the qalandariyyāt not to subvert or critique, but rather to augment the sociopolitical authority of the ruler of Qazvin, constructing a new and distinctly Saljuq model of Islamic kingship, a Qalandar King.

In the last decade tremendous advances have been made in the tools and platforms available for the digital study of manuscripts. Much work, however, remains to be done in order to address the wide range of pedagogical, cataloging, preservation, scholarly (individual and collaborative), and citizen science (crowdsourcing) workflows and use cases in a user-friendly manner. This study (1) summarizes the feedback of dozens of technologists, manuscript experts, and curators obtained through survey data and workshop focus groups; (2) provides a “state of the field” report which assesses the current tools available and their limitations; and, (3) outlines principles to help guide future development. The authors in particular emphasize the importance of producing tool-independent data, fostering intellectual “trading zones” between technologists, scholars, librarians, and curators, utilizing a code base with an active community of users, and re-conceptualizing tool-creation as a collaborative form of humanistic intellectual labor.

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for printed classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines. These accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual accuracy rates of the various proprietary OCR options for printed classical Arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source OCR software called Kraken (developed by Benjamin Kiessling, LU), thus enabling us to make this Arabic-script OCR technology freely available to the broader Islamicate, Persian, and Arabic Studies communities in the near future.

Modern treatments of Sufi love theory have had a pronounced tendency to disembody and "straighten" Sufi eroticism in various ways. Focusing primarily on a series of anecdotes from the hagiography of the thirteenth-century Persian poet and profligate Sufi lover, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī, the author argues that the centrality of bodies and embodied textual performances of Sufi love theory in Sufi hagiographic works not only militates against efforts to reduce this form of desire to a disembodied or philosophical love of "beautiful forms," but it also helps us to re-embody a particular type of beloved: a same-sex beloved who often gets obscured and metaphorized out of corporeal existence in much modern scholarship. Medieval Sufi eroticism, the author concludes, should not be viewed as a rejection of the body and sexuality, but rather an effort to harness the considerable affective potency inherent in these phenomena for spiritual ends.