Digitization Project "Translatio"
Establishment of a research platform
The digitization project “Translatio” at the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Languages (Abteilung für Islamwissenschaft und Nahostsprachen) at the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn focuses on Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish periodicals published during the Middle Eastern and Asian “saddle period” between 1860 and 1945 and making them digitally accessible. The project has initially been supported by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of North-Rhine Westphalia (01st November 2013 to 31st October 2014) and is financed from then on by the Department of Islamic studies and Middle Eastern languages.
In a first step, the relevant and extremely scattered sources are being identified, collected from different libraries and then - in consultation with the respective institution - digitized in Bonn. The completeness of the journals is of high relevance. Subsequently, the single issues of the journals will be prepared, whereby the structuring and allocation of the dates given in the original will provide higher usability. At the end, the periodicals are published in the Digital Collections of the University and State Library of Bonn, which makes the digital copies - as JPEG and PDF files - available online for free.
For further information about the digitized periodicals, their content and their history, Wikipedia articles in English and German are provided. In addition, the project offers comprehensive and continuously updated information on national and international digitization projects, which can be found on the homepage as well as on Facebook and Twitter. Great importance is attached to networking the project through social media.
Currently, cooperations exist with the following German libraries: Bamberg University Library, Oriental Seminar of the University of Freiburg, Mainz University Library, Bavarian State Library Munich, Tübingen University Library.
This project was built and supervised by Yasmin El-Menshawy and was developed together with Alina Gläser, Nusrat Khan and Claudia Garbers (2013- 2022).
