Since September 2024, I have been the editor of the new section of The Digital Orientalist on Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies, following the restructuring of the Middle Eastern and African team. My name is Sara Zanotta, and I am a PhD student in History at the University of Pavia. My primary research interest lies in the history of Qajar Iran and the global circulation of Iranians between the late 19th and early 20th century, especially towards other parts of Asia and North-East Africa. I am also a member of the research project “Arms, Beads, Cloth: African Consumers and the 19th-century Global Economy” and, as of January 2025, I will be research fellow in the ERC CoG “Unpacking Mixedness for an Inclusive History of the Red Sea, 1800s-2000s” at the University of Turin. The extensive use of digital archives in my research activities, as well as my involvement in creating new digital resources for the projects I participate in, has led me to engage more directly with this field, including my participation in the activities of The Digital Orientalist.
The Persian, Turkish, and Biblical studies team includes three contributors but also publishes posts from guest contributors. Indeed, it was a guest contributor who published the first post of this section. Helen Giunashvili’s post “Digitized Examples of the 17th-century Georgian-Persian Illuminated Historical Documents from Georgian Repositories” continued a reflection on the digitization of Georgian-Persian illuminated documents in Georgian archives started in her previous post of 2023. Giunashvili illustrated the characteristics of these bilingual deeds dating back to the 17th century, representing valuable sources to reconstruct the historical and socio-cultural relations between Georgia and Safavid Iran. Moreover, Giunashvili also digitized some examples of these deeds held in Georgian archives, which are available for viewing in the post.
The second post of this section was Zachary Butler’s “Collating Greek Manuscripts”. A contributor of The Digital Orientalist focusing on Biblical studies, Butler continued introducing the readers to the software package Criticus that the author presented in detail in a post at the beginning of 2024. Butler’s most recent post helps to navigate the process from transcription to collation of Greek manuscripts to reach the result of a single XML collation file.
Finally, a few weeks ago, we have published the post of Emine Turkmen, contributor for Ottoman and Turkish studies, titled “Exploring the (Digital) World of Ottoman Turkish Texts: The Digital Ottoman Corpora”. Turkmen presented Digital Ottoman Corpora, a platform that digitally preserves Ottoman-Turkish documents. The author showed how thanks to the integration of AI, Digital Ottoman Corpora facilitates researchers in the transcription, preservation, and study of Ottoman Turkish sources.
As the year comes to an end, the activities of the Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies team continue uninterrupted. In January 2025, two new posts by Zach Butler and Dena Shamsizadeh will continue our exploration of the intersection between digital humanities and Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies. They will surely be exciting reads and 2025 will certainly be a thrilling year for digital humanities in our fields!
The Digital Orientalist 