Editing Avestan

1st Workshop of ECoDA (European Cooperation on Digitizing Avestan)

2nd Workshop of the cooperation between ADA (Avestan Digital Archive, University of Salamanca) and Digital Humanities (University of Frankfurt)

November 4th-6th, 2011 in Frankfurt

Institute of Empirical Linguistics

Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt

Georg-Voigt-Str. 6

60325 Frankfurt

Contact: Thomas Jügel [thomas _ juegel (at) yahoo (dot) de]

Supported by the DFG within in the program "Initiation and Intensification of Bilateral Cooperation".

Participants

University of Berlin: Dr. Götz König, Dr. David Buyaner, Dr. Miguel Ángel Andres Toledo
University of Bologna: Birgit Costazza
University of Frankfurt: Prof. Jost Gippert, Prof. Alexander Mehler, Dr. Ralf Gehrke, MA Armin Hoenen, Dipl.-Inform. Rüdiger Gleim, MA Thomas Jügel, Dr. des. Saloumeh Gholami
University of Göttingen: Dr. Kianoosh Rezania, MA Shervin Farridnejad
University of London: Prof. Almut Hintze, MA Leon Goldman, MA Arash Zeini
University of Salamanca: Prof. Alberto Cantera, MA Juan José Ferrer

Background

The "ADA" project ("Avestan Digital Archive" ) and the LOEWE project "Digital Humanities" are cooperating by means of data exchange and technical support (software) with the aim of identifying the Gewährshandschrift for an edition of the Avestan text. While "ADA" follows a philological approach, "Digital Humanities" is especially aiming at developing computational means for evaluating the data and generating stemmata.

Aims

The edition of the Avestan text as well as the testing of newly developed software is only possible with a huge amount of data that, in turn, can only be acquired by pooling the capacities of various scientific research institutions.

The Institutes of Iranian Studies of the Universities of Berlin, Göttingen, and London, as well as the projects "ADA" and "Digital Humanities" share the insight that a new edition of the Avestan text based on reliable data is necessary more than ever, before any further research can be undertaken, because the current standard edition of Geldner (1886-96) is outdated, incomplete and partly even unreliable.

In order to achieve this aim of a new edition, manuscripts must be digitized. Furthermore, future research must supply the developed software with all the relevant data to enable the program to create a reliable stemma.

This enormous task can only be accomplished collaboratively. It needs precisely defined conventions to ensure that the information gathered from various sources is compatible.