Of Making Many Copies There is No End: The Digitization of Manuscripts and Printed Books in Arabic Script

Abstract

The invisibility of the medium makes its use instrumentala nd decreases the fascination with technology." Marija Dalbello, "AGenealogy of Digital Humanities""Ever sincet he fifteenth century those whoh avem ade facsimilesh aveb een at pains to stress how close they aretotheir models.The claims of modern e-publishingare not new." David McKitterick, Old Books, New TechnologiesThe digitization of manuscripts and printedb ooks occurs in aw ide rangeo f socio-economic and political contexts. In the following,Iwill use the distinction between "physical book" and "written text" to highlight the differenceb etween the material artifact and its literarycontent.While abook'sphysicality is immediatelyexperienced whenever we open am anuscript or printed book, the materiality of an e-book is primarilynoticed whenever areadingdevice indicatesthat there is no storagespace left for saving yetanother digital file. Themostcommon application of digitization remains the commercial and not-for-profit publication of writtent extsthat werenot "born-digital" as e-books. This application aims at facilitating access to literarycontent by creatingadigital copy of awritten text.² Ad ecade after the announcement of "Google Print" at the Frankfurt Book Fair and the launch of the "Google Books Library Project" in the US,e lectronic texts are no longer experienced as novel or strange,³ even though manyr eaders  This essayisarevised version of the paper "Manuscripts and Printed Books in Arabic Script in the Ageo ft he e-Book: The Challengeso fD igitization," presented on  October  at the symposiumo nD igital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies at Brown University.I am much indebted to Karin Hörner,J ane R. Siegel, and Elias Muhanna for their insightful comments on the essay'sf irst version. All errors are mine.  With regardtothe digitization of Arabic literature, the most recent project is NYU'sArabic Collections Online, which offers ad igital library of public-domain Arabic-languagec ontent at: http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/.  WendyH ui KyongC hun and Lisa Marie Rhody, "Workingt he Digital Humanities:Uncovering Shadows between the Dark and the Light," differences:AJournal of FeministCultural Studies  no.  (): "unless there is acorecontingent of faculty whocontinue to distributetheir work in typed manuscripts and consultprint indexes of periodicals that Idon'tknow about,everyone is alreadyadigital humanist" (); cf. Hubertus Kohle, Digitale Bildwissenschaft (Glückstadt: Ver-lagW erner Hülsbusch, ), . Brought to you by | Universita degli Studi di Padova Authenticated Download Date | 3/29/16 11:22 AM 66 Dagmar Riedel Brought to you by | Universita degli Studi di Padova Authenticated Download Date | 3/29/16 11:22 AM Brought to you by | Universita degli Studi di Padova Authenticated Download Date | 3/29/16 11:22 AMcationsofdigitization cannot be strictlyseparatedfrom each other. Forexample, digitallyp ublished critical editions and facsimiles are instanceso fe -book production in the service of textual scholarship and prese...

Millennial Muslims and Use of Cyber-Islam: A Case Study of Bilal Philips and Mufti Menk on Twitter and their Impacts

“…Dagmar Riedel points out how the digitisation of Islamic manuscripts has led to many scholars of Islamic studies keeping prominent social media accounts, on Facebook and Twitter, to cater for enthusiasts of the Muslim textual heritage. 36 Philip N. Howard has shown how Twitter and Facebook are used in "Political Islam". 37 In another work, Philip N. Howard & Muzammil M. Hussain demonstrated how the Arab Spring occurred due to the use of social media platforms.…”