Following on the success of our Islamicate textual technologies reading group last academic year, we at the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative are offering a new online reading/working group for the fall of 2023, with a related focus though somewhat different format. This year our focus will be specifically on manuscripts and digital paleography and codicology, giving participants the opportunity to present on the manuscripts upon which they are working, exploring new areas of codicological analysis, experimenting with digital tools and techniques, and working out resolutions to problems encountered in the course of manuscript work. We will have some group readings in secondary literature, but the primary focus will be on the presentation and analysis of manuscripts themselves in all their facets and the textual traditions they contain. 

Participants will be invited, though obviously not required, to take part in an ongoing OpenITI project involving the construction and eventual publishing of multiple manuscript witness texts, exploring textual variability and evolution over time, using a suite of tools and methods currently under development. For anyone working on specific texts or bodies of work this project is an excellent opportunity to arrive at edited texts that respect and encompass the specific realities of manuscript tradition, avoiding the kinds of constraints and limitations that tend to come in the train of print-based editions and readings of premodern texts. 

Once a month there will be a weekly session featuring a speaker or group of speakers presenting on a topic broadly connected with manuscript studies and/or digital humanities; these talks will also be recorded and uploaded to the OpenITI YouTube channel. A schedule of speakers will be posted here once it is available. 

If you are interested in joining this group, contact me directly at jallen22@umd.edu; I hope to begin meetings at the beginning of September and meet on a weekly to bi-weekly basis. All meetings will be held via Zoom at a previously worked-out time so as to accommodate as well as possible folks from across the world. Anyone with an interest and some level of experience in working with Islamicate manuscripts, in any language, are encouraged to join- no sort of institutional affiliation, degree obtainment, or other credentials are required. We do ask that all participants have some relevant language ability, regardless of which language written in Arabic script it may be; Arabic and Persian knowledge will be of especial help but are not required.