A MITH Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, April 25, 12:30-1:45

MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

MITH is pleased to present two more of its current Fellows discussing their ongoing work in digital humanities, specifically (in this instance) scholarly databases. Please join us for these two presentations.

“Yintong: the Chinese Phonological Database”

DAVID PRAGER BRANNER, Associate Professor of Chinese

Yintong is a database of Chinese historical phonology with a number of new search mechanisms. It is designed to make this arcane but important body of knowledge accessible to students and other non-specialists who can use it in the study of modern Chinese dialects, classical literature, and historical linguistics.

“The Steinschneider Bibliographical Database: Digitizing a Classic Reference Work for Arabic and Latin Premodern Philosophy, Science, Medicine, and Literature Translated into Hebrew”

CHIP MANEKIN, Associate Pofessor of Philosophy

In 1893 the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider published the crowning achievement of a long and distinguished scholarly career — a thousand page bibliographical essay (in German) entitled The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages, and the Jews as Transmitters. For over a century, the Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages has been the primary reference source for medieval Jewish philosophy, science, medicine, and literature, translated from the Arabic and Latin into Hebrew. It is the classic work on the translation movement of the High Middle Ages from Arabic and Latin into Hebrew. Over a century old, it has never been translated, revised, or updated. The Steinschneider Bibliographical Database (SBD), a project of MITH and funded in part by an NEH collaborative grant, will be a fully searchable English translation, revision, and update of Steinschneider’s work prepared by scholars in Germany, Israel, and the US that will be available to scholars on the world wide web. As part of the website scholars will be able to consult digital images of Steinschneider’s own annotated copy of the original German, as well the fifteen-hundred page handwritten French memoire that preceded the German print edition.

Coming up @MITH, *Friday,* April 28th 9:30-12:00 in the McKledin Special Events Room (6137): A Morning of Discussion About Electronic Literature. In preparation for the Electronic Literature Organization’s impending move to MITH (www.eliterature.org), two of the organization’s directors, ALAN LIU (Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara) and JOE TABBI (Professor of English, University of Illinois Chicago) will visit to present talks on the preservation and collecting of electronic literature, as well as a new curriculum (at Santa Barbara) to support its teaching.

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100609001120/http://mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2006.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Acting Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).