Fellows Presentations

David Prager Branner and Chip Manekin

David Prager Branner
Associate Professor of ChineseUniversity of Maryland
Chip Manekin
Associate Professor of PhilosophyUniversity of Maryland

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" by 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" by Chip Manekin, Associate Professor 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.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).