The Digital Orientalist

In our new article, Zach Butler introduces Xeirographa (www.xeirographa.com), a platform that teaches users how to read Greek manuscripts developed by Jacob Peterson (www.jacobwpeterson.com).

Read more on our website!
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2026/03/06/x...

The Digital Orientalist Rebrand and Naming Feedback Dear DO readers, Over the years the name of our publication has prompted some negative commentary. We are fully aware of the contentious meaning of “Orientalism” and its relation to colonialism. Stil...

📝 Survey: The Digital Orientalist Rebrand and Naming Feedback
🔗 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
📝 Feedback and Inquiries on our blog:
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/feedback-and...

📖 Read the full report on our website!
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2026/03/03/t...
#digitalhumanities

Our new blog post is a report from The DO Board following the 2025 rebrand survey, which addressed the problematic history of the term “Orientalist.”We have published an updated survey and welcome any feedback, thoughts, ideas, or comments via the links below ⬇️

📢 Call for Bursaries: DH2026

To encourage new contributions to scholarship in the digital humanities, ADHO offers bursaries to students and early career scholars whose submissions have been accepted for presentation at DH2026.
Submission deadline: April 1, 2026
More info: adho.org/awards/confe...

Chinese Text Project The world's largest digital library of pre-modern Chinese: an open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attemp...

邁入嶄新時代? ctext.org announced today that AI translations of "all texts in the pre-Qin and Han corpus that previously lacked translations, the 25 dynastic histories, as well as hundreds of other historical, literary, philosophical and poetic works" have been added today: (1/2)

​​Archives in Indian Languages as Digital Commons in India This is a follow-up to part one on the “Future of the Commons” conference published earlier this week. While that article focused on developments in AI for Indian languages, this one do…

📖 Archives in Indian Languages as Digital Commons in India
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/09/13/a...

📖 AI and Indian Languages: Wishful Thinking?
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/09/10/a...

📖 Linked Data: An Intensive Introduction by Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/05/21/l...

Sindhi Halchal Archive: Building on the PG Sindhi Library In my previous post, I wrote about potentialities: I spoke about what might be doable for the Sindhi presence within the digital archiving scene in terms of annotation, transliteration, and curatio…

📖 Sindhi Halchal Archive: Building on the PG Sindhi Library
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/09/12/s...

📖 PG Sindhi Library: Revisiting the Archive after 18 Months
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/01/03/p...

Imagining a Contextual Tech for Indian Languages: A Postcard from Bahu Bhasa 2025 Building on the conversations initiated under the Future of the Commons (overviews of which can be found here and here), Bahu Bhasa organised by the Open Knowledge Initiative at IIIT Hyderabad, in …

📖 Imagining a Contextual Tech for Indian Languages: A Postcard from Bahu Bhasa 2025
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/12/09/i...

📖 Sindhi Sanchaya: A Repository of Data about Sindhi Books
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/10/03/s...

Over the years, Soni Wadha, a specialist in the Sindhi language, has written about the archiving and preservation of Sindhi books and documents, as well as reported on conferences and initiatives aimed at bringing language technology to the myriad languages of India.

Links below⬇️

Teaching Bengali Digital Texts to Anglophone Undergraduates: What Voyant Reveals about the Infrastructural Bias of DH Tools In designing an introductory Digital Humanities class, I am often faced with the question of how best to incorporate linguistic diversity, particularly from the Global South, for a predominantly An…

Post by the same author:
digitalorientalist.com/2025/11/25/t...

Seeing the Text Arranged: Using Omeka to Critically Engage with Bengali Language Texts In my previous post, I discussed how using Voyant reveals the infrastructural bias of DH tools when confronted with an Indic language such as Bengali. In what follows, I wish to outline the strateg…

digitalorientalist.com/2026/02/27/s...

In our new blog post, Sunayani Bhattacharya explores using Omeka for digital curation as a critical method in teaching Bengali texts. From metadata to visual storytelling, the article offers creative work-arounds for engaging non-Latinate archives from the Global South.

Link below ⬇️

📢 We are welcoming guest submissions!

Our guideline for submissions:
digitalorientalist.com/submit-your-...

We are especially interested in expanding our coverage to Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Africa, and Sinological studies for any period after 500 CE!

🌐 Miwo App
🔗 codh.rois.ac.jp/miwo/

GitHub - ndl-lab/ndlkotenocr_cli: NDL古典籍OCRのアプリケーション（ソースコードを含む） NDL古典籍OCRのアプリケーション（ソースコードを含む）. Contribute to ndl-lab/ndlkotenocr_cli development by creating an account on GitHub.

OCR software and apps mentioned in the article:

🌐 Full NDLkotenOCR model
🔗 github.com/ndl-lab/ndlk...

🌐 NDLkotenOCR-Lite (user-freidnly interface)
🔗 github.com/ndl-lab/ndlk...

🌐 Komonjo Camera 古文書カメラ
🔗 camera.fuminoha.jp

🌐 Kuzushiji OCR
🔗 codh.rois.ac.jp/kuzushiji-ocr/

Our new blog post, “Overview of NDL古典籍OCR: The Key to Early Modern Japanese Archives?”, is a guest contribution by Xia-Kang Ziyi, which provides an overview of OCR technology for Japanese kuzushiji and introduces NDLKotenOCR-Lite model.

Read more on our blog!
digitalorientalist.com/2026/02/24/o...

Our new blog post by Michel Wong (@humboldtuni.bsky.social ) is a curated guide to online repositories of Chaghatai Turkic manuscripts and printed texts, covering collections in Central Asia and beyond.

Read more on our blog!
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2026/02/20/a...

The Consortium DISTAM (DIgital STudies Africa, Asia, Middle East): structuring DH in areal studies in France Since 2022, DISTAM (DIgital STudies Africa, Asia, Middle East) has been a consortium of the French research infrastructure Huma-Num. It is intended to accompany and consolidate the digital transiti…

📖 The Consortium DISTAM (DIgital STudies Africa, Asia, Middle East): structuring DH in areal studies in France
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/05/28/t...

Digitising the Archives of a Rural Radio in Mali: A Transnational Project The Malian radio station in Kayes, close to the Senegalese border, was founded in 1988, as part of an Italian cooperation program and in the context of an authoritarian state with a monopoly on inf…

📖 Digitising the Archives of a Rural Radio in Mali: A Transnational Project
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/10/04/d...

📖 Cocoon: A Platform for Documenting the World’s Languages
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2023/05/12/c...

Ethiopic Miracles: A Database to Link Images and Texts of Marian Miracles The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean & Egyptian Miracles of Mary Project (PEMM), hosted by Princeton University, aims to bring together the miracles of the Virgin Mary that have circulated in the …

📖 Ethiopic Miracles: A Database to Link Images and Texts of Marian Miracles
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/12/31/e...

📖 Wikipedia as an Open Access Tool for Restituting Knowledge on African Past
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2026/01/27/w...

African and Oceanian Objects in French Museums: Mapping as a Tool for Rethinking Heritage and Historicizing Objects The collections of African objects in French museums remain rather unknown. Yet the holdings of some 200 French museums contain some 150,000 objects from Africa. This number is far from being reall…

📖 African and Oceanian Objects in French Museums: Mapping as a Tool for Rethinking Heritage and Historicizing Objects
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2023/01/27/a...

📖 Islam West Africa Collection: Dataset, Distant Reading, and Uses of AI for Discourse Analysis
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/09/23/i...

- Cocoon (COllections de COrpus Oraux Numériques, cocoon.huma-num.fr/exist/crdo?l... )

- The Langarchiv project ( langarchiv.hypotheses.org )
- The Consortium DISTAM (DIgital STudies Africa, Asia, Middle East, distam.hypotheses.org )

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Read more on our blog ⬇️

- The Islam West Africa Collection (islam.zmo.de/s/westafrica... )
- Digital Benin ( digitalbenin.org )
- The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean & Egyptian Miracles of Mary Project ( pemm.princeton.edu/en-us, @princeton.edu)

Beginning with her overview article, "African and Oceanian Objects in French Museums," @transcrireada.bsky.social ( @cnrs.fr ) has introduced us to several vital digital humanities initiatives focused on preserving African history and languages, including:

M-Classi: A Digital Tool for the Classification of Sciences in Islam and Beyond Introduction A fundamental question in the history of science from antiquity to the premodern era is how people organized knowledge, what ideas shaped the classification of sciences, and how they r…

📖 M-Classi: A Digital Tool for the Classification of Sciences in Islam and Beyond

🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/03/14/m...

📖 At the Dawn of Digital Studies on Arabic Script in France (2) : A Brief History of Handwritten Arabic Text Recognition in France

🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/04/22/a...

Syriac AI Manuscripts and Fragments: Reimagining Digitally the Damaged Past The field of Syriac Digital Humanities continues to advance rapidly, moving from basic text recognition (as discussed in my previous posts on OCR/HTR, particularly our launch of the first public Sy…

📖 Syriac AI Manuscripts and Fragments: Reimagining Digitally the Damaged Past
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/10/21/s...

📖 Beyond Artificial Intelligence: Human Recognition of a Syriac Fragment in Turfan
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/05/13/b...

Our latest post is an Editor’s Digest of our Middle Eastern Studies publications from February 2025 to February 2026, curated by Maria S. Thomas (@vuamsterdam.bsky.social ).

Read the full articles on our blog!
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2026/02/17/e...

2025-26 DO Middle Eastern Studies posts⬇️:

Digital resources for the study of Buddhist Art in Central Asia: a general overview When it comes to Buddhist studies, the number of online resources can feel very overwhelming – from the thousands of pages of the Chinese Buddhist canon, to the humongous digital archives of manusc…

3) Digital resources for the study of Buddhist Art in Central Asia: a general overview (Alice Casalini, University of Chicago)
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2022/09/27/d...

An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for East Asian Studies Reviewed by The Digital Orientalist Members Since its founding in 2013, The Digital Orientalist has grown from a research blog by Cornelis van Lit to an online magazine with a continuously evolving team of +20 scholars and researchers from a…

2) An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for East Asian Studies Reviewed by The Digital Orientalist Members ( @madpoli.bsky.social, Yale University)
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/09/19/a...

An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for Central and South Asian Studies Reviewed by The DO Members This overview is inspired by Maddalena Poli’s recent post, which (re-)introduces East Asian Studies resources featured in The DO. Since joining in 2022, I’ve observed a steady growth in contr…

1) An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for Central and South Asian Studies Reviewed by The DO Members (Rachael Griffiths, EPHE-PSL)
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/10/24/a...