Arabic and Georgian sources for Byzantine and Medieval history

SunoikisisDC Digital Classics and Byzantine Studies: Session 11

Date: Monday June 24, 2024. 16:00-17:30 BST = 17:00-18:30 CEST.

Convenors: Nathan Gibson (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Tamara Kalkhitashvili (Ilia State University)

Youtube link: youtu.be/pVnb5xWouAk

Slides: Combined slides (PDF)

Outline

In the first part of this session, we will provide a brief introduction to Byzantium as depicted in various Georgian primary sources. These include hagiography, historiographical texts, manuscript colophons, numismatic materials, and inscriptions. After reviewing inscriptions that contain the names of Byzantine rulers, we will encode the text of the Oshki inscription, which commemorates the death of Basil II. This encoding will be done according to EpiDoc guidelines. We will observe how this encoding process leads to the creation of a digital epigraphic edition using EFES (the result will resemble an example from ECG). In the second part of this session, we will consider how to create a network graph of persons from an Arabic biographical text. This includes:

1. Identifying and tagging person names in a TEI-encoded text with identifiers (URIs)
2. Extracting persons and relations (nodes and edges) from the tagged text in a network format
3. Loading persons, relations, and accompanying attributes into a network visualization program
4. Filtering and adjusting the visualizations to focus on particular dynamics of the network
5. Reflecting on how to interpret these visualizations

Required readings

• Bodard, Gabriel and Yordanova, Polina (2020) Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES: A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc editing process. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Digitalia, 65 (1). pp. 17-35.https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/9524/.
• "Introduction" and "Networks are always metaphorical" (chapter 1) in Ahnert, Ruth, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart. 2020. The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities. Elements in Publishing and Book Culture. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108866804.

Further readings

• Nikolaishvili, Sandro (2019) Byzantium and the Georgian World c. 900-1210: Ideology of Kingship and Rhetoric in the Byzantine Periphery. Available: https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/nikolaishvili_sandro.htm.
• Lomouri, Niko and Makharadze, Neli (2010) Byzantium in Georgian Sources.
• Kalkhitashvili, Tamar (2022) Digital Edition of the Inscriptions of Georgia https://doi.org/10.32859/kadmos/14/7-32.
• Gibson, Nathan P., and Robin Schmahl. 2023. “Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians (Project Report).” Medieval Worlds 18 (July):196–218. https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no18_2023s196.
• "Visual Networks" (chapter 4) in Ahnert, Ruth, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart. 2020. The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities. Elements in Publishing and Book Culture. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108866804.

Resources

• EpiDoc Guidelines
• EFES
• Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia
• Primary source texts:
  • Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians, ed. E. Savage-Smith, S. Swain, G.J. van Gelder, A Literary History of Medicine (Leiden 2020) https://scholarlyeditions.brill.com/reader/urn:cts:arabicLit:0668IbnAbiUsaibia.Tabaqatalatibba.lhom-tr-eng1:p/?right=lhom-ed-ara1.
  • More Arabic primary source texts are available from OpenITI.
• Tools for tagging texts:
  • Visual Studio Code with the TEI Publisher Extension for Visual Studio Code
  • Alternatively: Recogito, or TEI Publisher running on an eXist-db server.
• Network visualization tools
  • As an app on your computer:
    • Cytoscape
    • Gephi
  • As a web app:
    • Nodegoat
  • For building into a web app:
    • D3JS javascript library, for which ObservableHQ notebooks are indispensable

Exercise

Option 1

1. Download and install the Oxygen XML editor or Visual Studio Code with the TEI Publisher Extension for Visual Studio Code.
2. Download and install EFES.
3. Download the dummy-structure.xml file (which already contains the inscription text and its translation).

Option 2

1. Download one or more of the following biographical entries in English or Arabic from Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa's history of physicians: Abū l-Faraj Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd ibn Yaḥyā (English, Arabic), Abū l-Faraj ibn al-Ṭayyib (English, Arabic), Ibn Buṭlān (English, Arabic).
2. Download and install [Visual Studio Code][vscode] if you don't have it already.
3. Download the Usaybia.net version of the TEI Publisher Extension from https://github.com/usaybia/tei-publisher-vscode/raw/master/sropheAuthority-vscode-1.0.3.vsix.
4. Install the VSIX file you downloaded as an extension in Visual Studio Code by clicking on the Extensions sidebar, then on the ... button, then on Install from VSIX....
5. Open one of the English or Arabic texts you downloaded in Visual Studio Code.
6. In the left sidebar, click on the circle icon that says "Srophe" to open the Usaybia version of TEI Publisher Tools. (If you don't see this icon, click on the ... icon and then on TEI Publisher Tools.)
7. Find the name of someone you want to tag in your text. Select the name, with your cursor, then press ctrl-shift-e on your keyboard (cmd-shift-e on Mac). The extension will search the Usaybia.net API for a matching name.
8. If a match was found, you'll see one or more names in a list in the sidebar. Click the + button beside one of them to add the URI of this person to the text.