Week One (Sept. 13): introduction to OpenITI manuscript-related projects, introduction to eScriptorium, start discussion of the history of the Shahnamah and the study of the Shahnamah as a text and its manuscript tradition

Readings: None

Week Two (Sept. 20): continued look at history of Shahnamah as a text and the parameters of its study and modern reception

Readings: Olga M. Davidson, ‘The Text of Ferdowsi's Shâhnâma and the Burden of the Past,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society , Jan. - Mar., 1998, Vol. 118, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1998), pp. 63-68.

Week Three (Sept 27): examination of manuscript exemplars, classify and catalog the layout features

Readings: Elaine Wright, The Look of the Book: Manuscript Production in Shiraz, 1303-1452, Freer Gallery of Art Occasional Papers, new series, v. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution ;, 2012), pp. 125-152; 231-254.

Week Four (Oct. 4): examination of manuscript exemplars, intersections of textuality and orality

Readings:

Julia Rubanovich, Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of Interaction across the Centuries, 1 online resource (xx, 456 pages) vols., Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, 1570-078X, volume 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

Week Five (Oct. 11): For the readings, write a paragraph or two summarizing the author's findings as they relate primarily to our interests, with a focus on source base (ie manuscript or printed edition) and methodology, include a brief note as to how the author's findings and method might be incorporated into our approaches and questions. For the transcriptions, be sure to enter the relevant data in the manuscript spreadsheet, and when we download a digitized manuscript we can store it in the shared folder.

Readings: Julia Rubanovich, ‘Tracking the Shahnama Tradition in Medieval Persian Folk Prose’, in Shahnama Studies II: The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama, ed. by Charles Melville and Gabrielle van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke, 'Manuscripts as Evolving Entities,' in One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts (De Gruyter : Berlin, Boston, 2016), 1–26.

Week Six (Oct. 18): readings in theory and application of phylogenetics, part i.

Readings: Christopher J. Howe et al., 'Manuscript Evolution,' Endeavour 25, no. 3 (2001): 121–26.

Guilherme D. Marmerola et al., 'On the Reconstruction of Text Phylogeny Trees: Evaluation and Analysis of Textual Relationships,' PLoS ONE 11, no. 12 (2016).

Week Seven (Oct. 25): readings in theory and application of phylogenetics, part ii.

Readings: Huson, Daniel H., Regula Rupp, and Celine Scornavacca. Phylogenetic Networks: Concepts, Algorithms and Applications. 1 online resource (xii, 362 pages) : illustrations vols. Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Week Eight (Nov. 1): readings in theory and application of phylogenetics, part iii.

Readings: Mendoza Straffon, Larissa. Cultural Phylogenetics: Concepts and Applications in Archaeology. 1 online resource (xii, 202 pages) : illustrations vols. Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, volume 4. Cham: Springer, 2016.

Week Nine (Nov. 8): handwritten text recognition current progress, meeting with Taylor and team to introduce their methods

Readings: tbd

Week Ten (Nov. 15): digital transcription work, readings in computational linguistics i.

Readings: Mateusz Fafinski, “Facsimile Narratives: Researching the Past in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, no. fqab017 (April 1, 2021).

Week Eleven (Nov. 22): readings in computational linguistics ii.

Readings: tbd

Week Twelve (Dec. 6): applications, i.

Readings: tbd

Week Thirteen (Dec. 13): applications, ii.

Readings: None