In previous years I have posted some interviews with different projects to trace the history of the Syriac Digital Humanities. You can find my previous posts here. Today, my post will be on one of the unique projects in Syriac Digital Humanities which is the project of DASH: Digital Analysis of Syriac Handwriting (https://dash.stanford.edu). We are privileged to meet Prof. Michael Penn, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and the Principal Investigator of DASH, who will tell us about the history, the state-of-art, and the vision of DASH.
Q1. Can you tell us about the technological background of DASH?
On the front-end, the script chart is a React application housed within a static website built with Jekyll. It uses Webpack to build the Javascript bundle and Bulma as a CSS framework. A Django application provides an API that supplies data from a MySQL database to the script chart application. The same Django application provides an administrative interface for project participants to manage data about the manuscripts and letter examples, and allows investigators to identify new letter examples. DASH is hosted on shared hosting from Reclaim Hosting.
Q2. As we know, research on Syriac Paleography is still limited (compared to the paleographic scholarship of other languages). How can DASH assist students and scholars in dating some Syriac manuscripts and fragments?
DASH is a paleographic reference tool that has two main aims. First, it assembles for the first time script examples from virtually every early, securely dated Syriac manuscript. As comparison with manuscripts that have colophons saying when they were written is the starting point for almost any paleographic project, having these accessible and in one place is essential for all interested in Syriac paleography. Second, DASH provides researchers multiple ways to visualize this data. At the macro-level it includes hi-resolution images of complete manuscript pages. You can also display pages from multiple manuscripts next to each other for easy comparison. At the micro-level it allows a researcher to instantly create customizable script charts of individual examples of one or more letter forms. So, for example, you can ask for a script chart with examples of every letter in the alphabet from a single manuscript. Alternatively, you can ask for a chart of letters from several manuscripts in parallel columns to easily compare with each other. Alternatively, DASH can chart the chronological development of one or more letters across almost seven centuries. Every chart is generated automatically in accord with the researcher’s parameters and generates a specific URL so the custom generated chart can instantly be shared with others. DASH also allows one to easily move between zooming in and zooming out. For example, if one simply hovers over a letter in an automatically generated script chart, it will show a small manuscript section around that one specific letter image so one can see where it appears in the manuscript and what’s around it. DASH is also usable via mobile devices (for those who want to do paleography on their cell phones). In addition to being useful for Syriac paleography, this interface design (and source code) can be used by scholars developing digital paleography projects in other languages as well.
Q3. Of course, this is a marvelous digital tool to help us study many historical aspects of the Syriac handwritten tradition, based on paleographic evidence. However, might historical contradictions (such as inaccurate colophons or misdated manuscripts in catalogues) challenge DASH?
Thanks in part to DASH, we have identified a couple of colophons that contain false composition dates. That is, in the middle ages later readers occasionally forged or changed colophons to make a manuscript look older than it really was. There is, of course, always the danger that there are other manuscripts that also have forged dates in colophons. In other words, at least conceptually the term “securely dated” should always have scare quotes. That said, because Syriac has a particularly large corpus of early manuscripts with dated colophons, a few misdated ones are unlikely to change the overall history of the development of Syriac script. But it does remind us that even a manuscript with a dated colophon needs to be examined carefully and compared to other such manuscripts. DASH is designed to help in such endeavors.
Q4. So far, DASH has used 200 Syriac manuscripts. How accurate would that be? Do you think that including more manuscripts or fragments, would enrich the precision of the results? If yes, can you share with our readers some of your plans in the future of DASH?
DASH contains 88,000 letter images from 88% of all securely dated Syriac manuscripts written before the twelfth century. High resolution digital copies of almost all the remaining early, securely dated manuscripts now appear on the just-released Sinai Manuscript Digital Library, or in a few cases, the most recently published catalog of Syriac manuscripts still in the monastery Deir al-Surian in Egypt. Between these two resources and DASH this means scholars can quickly access about 99% of early, securely dated Syriac manuscripts—something one can’t do in almost any other language. The purpose of DASH has always been to create a database of letters from securely dated manuscripts to allow folks to use them as a guide to estimate the composition date of other manuscripts of interest. There are not currently plans to expand the database or public facing interface further. There is, however, a huge amount of additional paleographic data the project gathered that serves as the basis for several upcoming articles. The team’s greatest hope, however, is that both the interface design and the source code (publicly available on GitHub) will be a help for future digital paleography projects both in Syriac and in other languages.
Thank you so much and we hope that DASH will continue its successful path!
The Digital Orientalist 