Description
With support from the Luce Foundation in 2014, the University of Kansas (KU) launched a digitization and research project on late 19 th and early 20 th century manuscripts in Turki, pre-modern Turkic languages used until about 1940 in China’s Xinjiang region (sometimes referred to as Chinese Turkestan) and elsewhere in Inner Asia. Turki languages were the precursors of modern Uyghur and Uzbek. The manuscripts are handwritten in about a dozen variants of Perso-Arabic script, Cyrillic and Latin. The literary, historical, religious, medical and legal knowledge they contain points to the cultural interchange that took place across Eurasia; yet because the scripts are non-standardized they present challenges for scholars, and the material thus remains relatively unknown and inaccessible.
Led by Arienne Dwyer, a linguistic anthropologist at KU, the project has been a collaboration with Sweden’s Lund University Library (LUL) as well as with scholars from various institutions working in digital humanities, computational linguistics, and the history of Islam and Inner Asia. The project’s focus has been the Jarring Collection at LUL. One of the world’s richest known corpora of Turki, this material was gathered in the 1920s and 1930s by the Swedish diplomat and philologist Gunnar Jarring when he was posted to Kashgar, in Xinjiang.
In its first phase, participating scholars identified and digitized manuscripts, chosen for their medical and cultural subject matter and linguistic significance; carried out labor-intensive preliminary transcription, translation and annotation of a subset of these; and developed the project’s technical infrastructure. Over 60 digital facsimiles are already available online through KU and LUL. The project team also drafted handbooks for manuscript interpretation and annotation, and for linguistic annotation, and has made presentations on its research and methods at Uyghur studies and digital humanities conferences.
Phase two, for which funding is requested, will enable the digitization and publication of approximately 100 additional manuscripts. This phase will also create exemplary digital editions of two manuscripts, an early 20 th century medical handbook and an illuminated 19 th century genealogical scroll, almost 30 feet long, which traces patronage and kin relations all the way from Adam, through Muhammed, to the scroll’s patron, Hazret Khan Khodjam Muhammed.
With the infrastructure now in place for computer-assisted analysis and search capability, the hand transcriptions and annotations done by Dwyer and her graduate students in phase one can be used to “train” computers for automated annotation of the larger digitized corpus of medical and linguistic material, enhancing the ability to explore the manuscript collection. Dwyer explains, “[T]he significance of these fragile manuscripts in difficult Perso-Arabic handwriting…is that they are crucial in the history of medicine in Inner Asia, especially the melding of Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and indigenous Turkic traditions and their migration across Eurasia. They reflect the strong Greco-Persian intellectual influence on Chinese Turkestan. [The project] will make them available for the first time en masse in translation and with scholarly commentary. Network analysis will allow visualization of relationships (personal ones in the genealogical scroll, and relations between medicines and treatments in the medical manuscripts). Grammatical analysis will allow linguists to trace the development of [Turki] to modern Uyghur.”
The University of Kansas’ Chinese studies program includes teaching and research on Chinese Inner Asia, and is one of the few places in the United States where Uyghur is taught. The project offers an opportunity for training at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Dwyer plans, for example, to use English translations of the manuscripts in an Honors class as a means for undergraduates to practice digital humanities techniques in data-mining while also learning about China and Chinese Turkestan. And a week-long workshop will train graduate students and more senior scholars in transcription and annotation of the manuscripts, in the process testing the draft handbooks prior to their publication. Dwyer highlights that the methods and resources resulting from the project, all of which will be open access, have relevance and broader applicability to the fields of linguistics, anthropology, history and digital humanities.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a two-year grant of $200,000 to the University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc. to support the second phase of the Annotated Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online project.
