Persian Digital Library: Help Create Persian Literature 2.0!

• published: 24 Sep 2015
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Persian literature is the lifeblood of Persian culture. The great poems of Mowlavi (Rumi), Sa’di and Hafez. Ferdowsi’s unforgettable portrayals of the epic exploits of ancient Persia’s great heroes in the Shah-Nameh (Book of Kings). These and many other classics of Persian literature have coursed through the veins of countless Persian speakers for more than a thousand years, inspiring millions throughout the world and promoting Persian culture wherever they spread. At University of Maryland’s Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, our Persian digital humanities team wants to shepherd these classics of Persian culture into the digital age by creating the Persian Digital Library—a state-of-the-art online hub for the Persian world. In collaboration with world leaders in digital humanities from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), UMD Libraries and the Perseus Digital Library, we want to create Persian Literature 2.0 and radically transform the ways Persian language, literature and culture are learned, studied and preserved in the 21st century. But we need your help! Please donate and help us lead the digital revolution in Persian studies through our Persian Digital Library project. What will the Persian Digital Library project do? * function as the go-to place for Persian literature, bringing together print, digital and manuscript versions of the Persian classics in an advanced online platform equipped with the latest Persian language ready tools for textual analysis and digital collaboration * Enable the crowdsourcing of the study and translation of the Persian classics by harnessing the collective knowledge and passion of the entire global community * Revolutionize Persian language and cultural education by actively engaging a diverse range of community members, including children, students, scholars and lovers of Persian culture worldwide * Bring the fields of Persian studies and digital humanities into a synergistic relationship, enriching the field of digital humanities with new insights from Persian studies and bringing new methods, tools and resources to the study of Persian culture What will the Persian Digital Library Project Deliver? The Persian Digital Library (PDL) will: * create an open-access corpus of more than 60,000 Persian poems from more than a thousand years of Persian literature (formatted according to the latest technological standards, e.g. TEI XML, CTS/CITE, IIIF) * crowdsource the study and translation of Persian literature through its online platform, which will facilitate collaborative research and teaching by enabling researchers, students and other lovers of Persian literature throughout the world to contribute to our understanding of Persian literature in a myriad of ways (e.g. collaborative translations, annotation, new critical and multi-text editions of Persian classics, Persian/English translation alignment and metadata creation). * provide animated versions of famous stories from Persian culture, beginning with “The Love Story of Rostam and Tahmineh,” done by the famous Iranian artist, Rashin Kheiriyeh * compile hundreds of high-value Persian manuscripts and lithographs digitized by major libraries and make them available through our online platform to encourage collaborate research, annotation, transcription and translation projects * make thousands of Persian books and translations full-text searchable for the first time through our work on Persian OCR with global leaders in the field * enhance Persian language teaching materials by offering “clickable” versions of every text in the PDL (with instant dictionary lookup and morphological analysis of each word) and the first high-frequency Persian language readers * customize versions of common computational textual analysis programs (e.g. R), and thus, enable for the first time macro analysis of the corpus of texts in the PDL Note: All texts, programs, and technology developed during this project will be released online and made publicly available for everyone in the world to download, use, reuse, and adapt. The Persian digital humanities team at the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies is ready to create Persian Literature 2.0. But it will only be possible with your help. Please donate. Spread the word. Become part of the digital revolution in Persian studies!