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CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

Screen shot of the CEDAR digital platform

CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

This project extends a multi-year digital humanities initiative that is producing critical editions of canonical texts. In the first phase, the research team built a database that includes the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. In this phase they will add the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Middle English poem Piers Plowman, the works of Herman Melville, and Indigenous American sign systems. They will also develop new modes of digital analysis and collaboration for scholars across different fields of expertise.

CEDAR is a multi-project digital humanities initiative involving literary corpora that have complex histories of composition, revision, and dissemination. The first phase of the project focused on three corpora written in different historical periods using very different languages and scripts. The initial projects involved the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. This phase adds four more projects: one ancient, on the Egyptian Book of the Dead; one medieval, on the Middle English poem Piers Plowman; one modern, on the works of Herman Melville; and a project on indigenous American sign systems that is not easily categorized under traditional rubrics of Western literature. This diverse and growing group of projects demonstrates the practical benefits of a shared computational platform for scholarly research and the corresponding intellectual benefits of jointly addressing a shared conceptual challenge faced by scholars in very different fields. The challenge is to design digital editions of literary works that preserve the hard-won achievements of traditional philology but open these works to new readings and new modes of analysis. CEDAR does this via a state-of-the-art database representation of both the internal epigraphic and discursive structures of texts, in all their complexity, and their external relations with one another and with other cultural media through time and space. By the end of Phase Two, CEDAR will be ready to welcome scholars in all fields to contribute to a new University of Chicago series of online critical editions.

To learn more, please visit the CEDAR website.

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The CEDAR Project: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

A screenshot of the CEDAR database shows sophisticated digital analysis of a biblical text.

The CEDAR Project: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

This project aims to produce open-access critical editions of four key textual corpora: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and a body of Middle Bengali poetry.

The CEDAR project aims to produce critical editions for the digital age. It brings together six faculty members from four different departments and schools in the University of Chicago as well as scholarly advisors from beyond the University. The textual foci of the project are four distinct literary corpora: English (Shakespeare), Assyriology (Gilgamesh), Biblical Studies (the book of Genesis), and South Asian literature (Middle Bengali poetry). Employing the OCHRE database software developed in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, CEDAR is creating digital text editions that are maximally descriptive and data-rich in their representation of texts and their media (including scrolls, codices, clay tablets, etc.). By comparing the features of exemplary texts studied in the respective fields represented in this project and by examining reflexively the scholarly practices of these fields, CEDAR will abstract the common challenges presented to philologists everywhere and apply lessons learned from one textual corpus to other texts written in quite different scripts, languages, and cultural contexts. In its software engineering component, CEDAR will follow the time-honored practice of identifying the common structural elements and algorithms inherent in a seemingly heterogeneous collection of data and methods, an approach that yields simpler, more elegant code that can be used for many different purposes. The intent is to make the critical editions produced by CEDAR available online in open access format with a sophisticated analytical user interface.

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Entanglements of the Indian Past

Hemachandra, Leaf from a Jain manuscript, 13th century

Entanglements of the Indian Past

A series of interdisciplinary workshops focused on key themes and pivotal moments that shaped the course of Indian historiography will help chart a future course for the study of the Indian past.

The Entanglements of the Indian Past project aims to make the study of the Indian past more self-conscious of the forces that have shaped it. A three-year series of interdisciplinary workshops will focus on three issues where serious engagement is critical: caste, materiality, and historicality. The project pairs each of these issues with a crossroad moment in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that determined the course that the study of the Indian past would take: Rahul Sankrityayan’s quest for a past that mirrored his commitments to justice and equality in the present, Muni Jinavijaya’s efforts to free Indian thought from the limitations of manuscript textuality, and Georg Bühler’s vision of recovering the history of a country that, according to a commonplace, “has no history.” Each of these moments reveals the intensity of political commitment, and the depth of vision, involved in studying the Indian past. This project will attempt to answer where such scholarship might go in the future.

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Living Aspirations

Living Aspirations

This project looked at aspiration as the link between human creativity and social and cultural processes of transforming and enriching life.

This project supported the Visiting Fellowship of Günter Thomas from Ruhr-University Bochum. In collaboration with William Schweiker (Divinity), Thomas explored the place of aspirations from the vantage point of moral philosophy, religious thought, and socio-cultural analysis. The project took it as intuitively the case that one of the most profound characteristics of human beings is to seek to realize their aspirations in actual life. The experience of aspirations coming alive, really motivating thought and action, is the starting point of all social, religious, and academic creativity. The project considered aspirations as the key missing link, under-examined in current thought, between human creativity and social and cultural processes of transforming and enriching life. The project raised three fundamental questions: (1) How and under what conditions do human aspirations become powerful drivers of innovation in culture, religion, the sciences, and society?; (2) What are the conditions that endanger human aspirations from motivating thought and action for the sake of enhancing life?; and (3) How do we distinguish between aspirations that are destructive of human life from those aspirations that respect and enhance life?

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What Are Arab Jewish Texts? Texts and Questions of Context

What Are Arab Jewish Texts? Texts and Questions of Context

This project explored the ways in which Jewish political thought and literature were transformed in the medieval and modern periods as a result of their interactions with Muslim and Arab cultures.

This project, organized by UChicago Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Orit Bashkin in partnership with Walid Saleh from the University of Toronto, explored the ways in which Jewish political thought and literature were transformed in the medieval and modern periods as a result of their interactions with Muslim and Arab cultures. Organized around themes of the Arab Jewish imaginary, printed Arab Jewish cultures, and construction of the Arab Jewish self, the collaboration engaged historians and literary scholars, novelists, and poets from the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East for an intensive three-day conference in spring 2014 with the goal of publishing an anthology of translated and original works of literature by, and about, Jews who lived in Muslim societies, and to examine whether such a collection, and the categories the conveners propose, make sense in the state of the field of Middle Eastern studies today.

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Working Group on Political Theology

Working Group on Political Theology

These scholars sought to define and refine a coherent agenda for a long-term, trans-disciplinary research project on theology’s influence on political ideas and institutions.

Scholarly literature suggests two reasons for the recent re-emergence of political theology across the social sciences and humanities, challenging what many thought was an outdated modality of inquiry. The first is a growing concern that the practical and theoretical subordination of politics to a service function for markets, which goes hand in hand with an isolation of individuals, deprives human beings of their potential to shape their future in collaboration with others. The second is a suspicion that the research orientation of much contemporary social science remains beholden to a positivist epistemology that can describe and analyze only what already exists, and thus (at least unwittingly) supports the subordination of politics by underplaying the creative potential of human beings to reimagine more satisfying lives in the company of others. Political theology promises to address these concerns by wondering about the orientation of politics to guiding values, and by searching for enduring historical influence of theological ideas on political concepts and the formation of political institutions. This project brought faculty from Classics, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Divinity, Germanic Studies, and English together with invited visiting scholars for bi-weekly workshops to define and refine a coherent agenda for a long-term, trans-disciplinary research project on political theology.

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A Worldwide Literature: Jami (1414-1492) in the Dar Al-Islam and Beyond

A Worldwide Literature: Jami (1414-1492) in the Dar Al-Islam and Beyond

The preparation of a digital corpus of the classical Persian poet’s works along with commentaries helped answer crucial questions largely neglected by Islamic historiography.

This one-year project aimed to develop a long-term research agenda capable of approaching transformative intellectual trends in the postclassical Muslim tradition by studying the reception of the works of polymath ’Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414-1492), one of the most widely read authors in the Eurasian continent between his lifetime and the early modern period. Ambitious in its theoretical aims and grounded in creative philological approaches, this project endeavored to provide answers to crucial questions largely neglected by Islamic historiography. UChicago faculty and visiting scholars refined a long-term agenda and prepared a digital collection and searchable corpus of Unicode texts comprising Jami’s works along with the Indian commentaries published by Naval Kishore in the 19th century.

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