IE Progresses to new critical step in its digitisation work 

22 June 2022 - Now that the Invisible East team has reached a critical stage in the development of its corpus software--that is aimed at making the images, transcriptions and translations of the medieval documents in New Persian, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, Bactrian, Sogdian, Khotanese, and Middle Persian freely available online--we have stepped up our collaboration with KITAB hosted at Aga Khan University-Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) and led by Sarah Savant. The KITAB project collaborates with the OpenITI platform, which will help us to distribute our digital files through GitHub and Zenodo platforms.

IE is also integrated as a collaborator on The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) which is the first undertaking of its kind to tackle the technical and organizational barriers that historically have stymied the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production for Islamicate Studies. IE Director and Principal Investigator Arezou Azad is on the Advisory Board of the programme.

The digital corpus is being managed by IE post-doctoral researcher Arash Zeini, who is supported by two encoders currently under training and recruitment.