The Arabic diatessaron project: Digitalizing, encoding, lemmatization

Abstract

The Arabic Diatessaron Project (henceforth ADP) is an international research project in Digital Humanities that aims to collect, digitalise and encode all known manuscripts of the Arabic Diatessaron (henceforth AD), a text that has been relatively neglected in scholarly research. ADP's final goal is to provide a number of tools that can enable scholars to effectively query, compare and investigate all known variants of the text that will be encoded as far as possible in compliance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. The paper addresses a number of issues involved in the process of digitalising manuscripts included in the two existing editions (Ciasca 1888 and Marmardji 1935), adding variants in unedited manuscripts, encoding and lemmatising the text. Issues involved in the design of the ADP include presentation of variants, choice of the standard text, applicability of TEI guidelines, automatic translation between different encodings, cross-edition concordances and principles of lemmatisation.