The digital exhibition had been introduced to the cultural heritage scene before the pandemic, but since Spring 2020, it’s here to stay, in part because of the accessibility of the form and in part, because increased familiarity with digital curation has allowed students, independent researchers, and others to partake in carefully bringing together objects and pairing them with one another. However, very few, if any, have tackled a digital exhibition exploring scent. That’s the challenge the curators of Bagh-e Hind, Bharti Lalwani and Nicolas Roth, have set themselves. The exhibition explores 17th and 18th century India through both the lens of scent and the garden: each exhibition room is based around either rose, narcissus, smoke, iris, or kewra, featuring not only paintings where the scent is part of what is being communicated, but poetry in translation, other objects related to those scents, and the curators’ notes, so we can follow along behind the scenes.
As Bagh-e Hind represents the collaboration between an academic and a perfumer (who is also an art critic), it sits nicely at the nexus of the communities Hazine is trying to cater to. Beyond simply documenting the curation of such an exhibition, there’s also something intriguing about the history of olfaction, which is often thought of as elusive: yet, Lalwani and Roth bring together multiple wells of knowledge to allow us to smell the past and challenge our ways of knowing.
عندما كنا نفكّر في موضوع للدعوة لكتابة المقالات المتعلقة بممارسة الفن واستهلاكه، أردنا أن نترك الباب مفتوحًا إلى حدٍ ما ولكن أردنا أيضًا أن نشجّع الكتّاب على التفكير النقدي في موضوع أثّر على حياتنا ومعيشتنا بشكلٍ لا نستطيع إنكاره، ألا وهو المجال الرقمي، وهناك الكثير من الكتابات والأبحاث النقدية التي تضع موضوع التطوّر الرقمي وما قدّمه لنا (وما أخذه منا) نَصب أعينها، ولكن علينا أيضًا مناقشة التغييرات التي طرأت على الفن بشكلٍ خاصٍ بفعل التطوّر الرقمي وكيفية ممارستنا واستهلاكنا له في ظل هذا التطوّر.
خلال الشهور القادمة، سنقوم بنشر مجموعة من المقالات بالعربية وبالإنجليزية ضمن هذه السلسلة لمناقشة قضايا تتعلق بماهية الفن الرقمي، وكيف أثّرت التكنولوجيا الرقمية على انتشار الفن، والطرق التي يقوم هؤلاء الشغوفين بالفن باستهلاكه والاستمتاع به، خصوصًا في أوقاتنا هذه التي ينتشر فيها وباء كورونا، وأيضًا، ما قدمته مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي للمشهد الفني. سنبدأ هذه السلسلة بمقالٍ باللغة العربية من تأليف إسلام علّام حيث يشارك معنا العملية الفكرية التي رافقت رحلته نحو تطوير أسلوبه الخاص في الفن الرقمي.
خلال السنة الماضية، قمنا بتقديم محتوى أكبر عن الفن بشكل خاص، وأثناء البحث عن الفنانين لكتابة المقالات وإجراء المقابلات معهم، أردنا أن نظهر أفكار مختلفة يتم إهمالها أحيانًا أثناء الممارسة والتفكير في الفن مثل الخط العربي، ولكنها تؤثّر على جوانب مختلفة من حياتنا، منها الجوانب الثقافية، وأردنا أيضًا إلقاء الضوء على مناطق مختلفة يظن الكثيرون أنها لا ترتبط ببعض الممارسات الفنية ولكنها مرتبطة بها بشكل تاريخي ووثيق. أيضًا، بدأنا مؤخرًا بالعمل على المراجعات النقدية للمعارض الفنية –وهذه مبادرة منفصلة عن سلسلة الفن والمجال الرقمي هذه– وقمنا بنشر أول هذه المراجعات وسنقوم بنشر المزيد خلال الأشهر القادمة، وبعض الأهداف من كتابة هذه المراجعات تكمن في اهتمامنا بالفن الإسلامي والتصميم بشكل واسع، وأيضًا أهمية التفكّر في الأساليب التي يقوم الفنانون باستخدامها أثناء ابتكارهم للأعمال الفنية والرسائل التي يتم إرسالها للمتلقي في ظل سياقات اجتماعية وسياسية واقتصادية معينة، ونرى أيضًا أن الممارسات الفنية مرتبطة ارتباط وثيق بالممارسات الأرشيفية والمكتبية. ونحن لا نتحدث فقط عن الفن فقد بدأنا أيضًا باستخدامه –في شكل القصة المصورة– كوسيلة للتحدث عن مواضيع اجتماعية مهمة، مثل المصدر المفتوح وكيفية تعريفه، للوصول لنوع آخر من المتعلم، وهو المتعلم البصري.
نتمنى أن تقوم هذه السلسلة بتشجيع الفنانين والمهتمين بالفن أن يكونوا على دراية بالأدوار المهمة التي يلعبها المجال الرقمي أثناء ممارستهم واستهلاكهم للفن والتي يمكن أن تكون سلبية في بعض الأحيان. أثناء نشرنا للمقالات، ننتظر منكم أن تشاركونا آرائكم بشأن المواضيع المطروحة. سنقوم بوضع روابط المقالات أدناه عند نشر كل مقال. إذا كان لديك رغبة في كتابة مقال عن موضوع خاص بممارسة الفن أو استهلاكه أو إذا كان هناك معرض يقام في منطقتك تريد أن تتحدث عنه أو تكتب مقال نقدي عنه، يمكنك التواصل معنا: hazineblog {@} gmail.com.
As we were brainstorming a theme for the call for pitches for essays on artistic practice and consumption, we sought to keep it relatively open but also to encourage critical thought on a phenomenon that has indisputably influenced how we go about our lives: the digital sphere. While there has been much critical discourse on the things that digital advancement has given (and taken away from) us, it is important to discuss how it has changed the ways in which we have practiced and consumed art.
Over the coming months, this series will present articles, in both Arabic and English, that discuss what constitutes digital art, how digital technology has influenced the dissemination of art, the ways in which art enthusiasts consume art, particularly in pandemic times, and what social media has brought to the art scene. We’ll begin our series with an essay in Arabic by Islam Allam where he takes us through the thought process that accompanied his journey towards developing his own digital artistic style.
The last year has seen Hazine slowly expand its offerings on art. While searching for artists to profile and interview, we have kept an open eye for modes of thought that are often overlooked while creating and thinking about artwork like Arabic calligraphy, as well as work that is done in settings that are not necessarily associated with certain artistic practices. We have also sought to emphasize that certain forms of art can and may belong to more peoples than we may assume. We recently began running exhibition reviews –distinct from the Art in the Digital Sphere series– and you’ll see more of those in the next few months. Part of the motivation behind this expansion is our commitment to Islamic art –broadly defined– and design. We’re also seeking to better understand and critique the methods which artists use in their work and the messages that viewers receive in light of particular social, political and economic contexts. Another element of it is our acknowledgement that artistic practice and curation overlap with archival and library practices. We have also begun, not only discussing artistic practice, but also using it as a tool –in the form of comics– to appeal to the visual learner to discuss significant issues, such as open access and how we define it.
We hope that this series will encourage practitioners and consumers of art to be critically aware of the important, and sometimes adverse, roles that the digital plays in their practice and consumption. As we release the essays, we’d like to know your thoughts on the ideas discussed. We’ll be linking the essays below as they come out. Get in touch and let us know if you want to contribute something on artistic practice, consumption or discourse or if there’s an exhibition in your area that you’d like to review: hazineblog {@} gmail.com.
: Two of Yushaa Abdullah’s artworks were exhibited and sold at the Dubai International Arabic Calligraphy Exhibition, 2017
Although Latin has become the dominant script in West Africa, one Nigerian calligrapher, Ustadh Yushaa Abdullah, has made major efforts to bring back the culture of the Arabic script to the region. Yushaa, who completed his studies in Turkey, is West Africa’s first certified calligrapher (he holds an ijazah). Here, we talk to him about his work, what led to his interest in Arabic calligraphy and the school he founded to teach various Arabic calligraphy scripts to students in Nigeria and the Republic of Niger. Yushaa also plans to develop a teaching technique alongside Nigerian scholars to more widely disseminate the rules for writing the traditional Arabic Hausawi script, which was developed in West Africa and is still taught to children in Nigeria today as part of their Islamic studies training.
Why have many artists chosen the digital sphere to represent their artwork? How has it impacted the appearance of their work and the meanings conveyed? Hazine is seeking 3-4 pieces on the digital world and art from the Mashriq, the Maghreb, East Africa, West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Turkey, or Iran. If you’re an artist, tell us what drives you to employ digital tools in your artwork and how these tools influence your work? Have you collaborated with other artists online? If you’re a consumer of art, how has viewing art online changed your relationship with it? Does it change the nature of consumption? Send pitches to hazineblog[at]gmail.com by Friday, January 22, 2021. To ensure a more organized process, please only send pitches and ideas by e-mail rather than through comments to this post.
Pitches should be no longer than 300 words and should be accompanied by a few sentences telling us who you are. Pitches (and pieces) are accepted in English and Arabic; we accept essays and are open to different forms. We are open to different forms of style as we expand this category of the site but do have a look at the essays we’ve run previously, like this one on typography and this one on archivy, because they demonstrate what we’re really looking for: a strong point of view. Completed essays –if accepted– will be 2000 words or less. Deadlines for completed pieces are flexible. Each piece is paid 100 USD upon publication.
لماذا اختار الكثير من الفنانين المجال الرقمي لممارسة الفن؟ كيف أثّر ذلك على شكل أعمالهم الفنية والمعاني التي يريدون إيصالها؟ ترغب خزينة في نشر من 3-4 مقالات عن العالم الرقمي وعلاقته بالفن في المشرق والمغرب وشرق أفريقيا وغرب أفريقيا وجنوب صحراء أفريقيا وآسيا الجنوبية وجنوب شرق آسيا وتركيا وإيران. إذا كنت فنانًا، أخبرنا ما الذي يدفعك نحو استخدام الأدوات الرقمية في أعمالك الفنية وكيف تؤثر هذه الأدوات على إنتاجك الفني. هل قمت بالتعاون مع فنانين آخرين على الإنترنت؟ إذا كنت من متابعي الفنون، كيف أثّرت مشاهدتك للأعمال الفنية على الإنترنت على علاقتك بالفن؟ هل غيّر الإنترنت طبيعة استهلاك الأعمال الفنية؟ قم بإرسال نبذة أو فكرة عن المقال الذي تريد أن تكتبه يوم الجمعة، 22 يناير، 2021 كحد أقصى إلى البريد الإلكتروني hazineblog[at]gmail.com.
لضمان عملية منظمة، نرجو إرسال النبذ والأفكار عبر البريد الإلكتروني فقط وليس من خلال تعليقات على هذا المنشور.
يجب ألا تكون النبذة أكثر من 300 كلمة وترافقها بعض السطور عن الكاتب. تقبل خزينة النبذ والمقالات باللغة العربية والإنجليزية، وترحّب بأساليب الكتابة المختلفة. نقوم الآن بتوسيع الجزء الخاص بالكتابة حول الفن على الموقع ويمكنك إلقاء نظرة على هذا المقال عن تصميم الخطوط الطباعية وهذا المقال عن الأرشفة لأنهم يُظهروا السمة التي نبحث عنها في الكتابة: وجهة نظر قوية. إذا تم قبول مقالك، يجب أن يكون 2000 كلمة أو أقل، وهناك مرونة في موعد تسليمه. سيتم دفع الكاتب 100 دولار أمريكي عند النشر.
By Torsten Wollina (MSC Cofund Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin)
There are several noteworthy initiatives in Germany that are pushing the boundaries of #openaccess to both sources and secondary literature. Only recently, a joint project of several German university and research libraries has received funding for creating an online union catalogues for manuscripts in the Arabic script held by those libraries (named Orient digital). Leipzig University is home to the long-term project Bibliotheca Arabica which aims at a reassessment of Arabic literary history by putting it in conversation with manuscript studies. Unofficially, it has already been described as Brockelmann 2 (or 2.0). The digitization project Translatio at Bonn University is currently identifying periodicals in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish published between 1860 and 1945 and makes them accessible online. Yet another initiative is the Bamberger Islam-Enzyklopädie headed by Patrick Franke. It provides a framework which aims at engaging scholars to disseminate their expertise on Wikipedia in German. Through this encyclopedia, authored Wikipedia articles become visible as citable publications.
At the moment, by far the largest initiative towards #openaccess is hosted by the University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle). It offers two main online resources: MENALIB is the virtual specialist library but I will be focusing here on the online repository MENAdoc because it is, in my opinion, a truly unique treasure trove of primary and secondary sources.
At the moment, even if you can concentrate on work, you might encounter several unanticipated challenges. One of them is access to literature absent from the large-scale repositories such as JStor, academia.edu or your own library. Archives and libraries remain unreachable. Archivists and librarians are doing all they can to move as much online as they can but they too should look out for themselves and their loved ones first and foremost. And while researchers and teachers cannot (I repeat: can not) do the work that archivists and librarians do, what we can do at the present moment is come together and engage in the age-old practice of sharing resources. And while this is being done already in many instances bilaterally, this contribution is concerned with a way to do it communally, to help students and teachers get around paywalls and other current inhibitors. Of course, this will always be useful to those without institutional access.
Here, I will present one way of using an existing platform to share documents, be they books, articles, images, or even sound files. The general idea is to bring together people needing a certain article, book, image or other sort of image, recording or source with others who have access to it. A kind of academic Ebay, maybe? While the browser based app Trello is first and foremost a project management tool, it is flexible enough to serve this purpose. It has several advantages.
Manuscript digitization projects are increasing accessibility to researchers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot access collections in person. The Manuscripts of the Muslim World project is one such exciting project to hit the scene, not least because they actively share recently digitized manuscripts on their active Twitter account. We talked to Project Cataloger Dr Kelly Tuttle about its place in the digital humanities landscape and how to use this exciting new tool.
Describe your academic background and involvement with the MMW project?
I have a PhD in Arabic from the University of Pennsylvania and use manuscripts frequently in my own research. Right after I completed the degree, I worked in a library for a year while I looked for a traditional academic job. Once I found one, I discovered that was not really what I wanted to be doing, so when this position was posted, I jumped on it. It has been great to return to library work and to see this variety of manuscripts. Every day is different and I’m learning so much. As far as what I do for the project itself, I’m the cataloguer, which means that I try to identify and describe each manuscript that is part of the project. I’m sure I make mistakes, but fortunately, there is a growing team of volunteers who are willing to contribute their advice to the project, when asked. I also produce the metadata for the digital images that appear on OPenn, an open access repository for primary source materials.What is MMW, and what is its current status
MMW stands for Manuscripts of the Muslim World (also called Muslim World Manuscripts by one of the participating repositories). It is a project supported by a 3-year Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and is currently in the beginning of its second year. As the grant name suggests, it is a cooperative effort to digitize and catalog the ‘hidden’ Islamicate manuscripts held in three repositories: Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College are also contributing holdings to the project. The collections were considered ‘hidden’ because many of the Islamicate manuscripts have been lingering uncatalogued in these repositories and therefore have remained largely unseen and unresearched. We hope that this grant will help make researchers, students, and other interested parties more aware of the holdings at each of these repositories and encourage their use. Since the manuscripts will also all be digitized in high quality file formats, anyone will be able to make use of these resources even if they are not able to come to the area in person. Since this is a cooperative project, there are many different players involved. Each institution has a project lead, Mitch Fraas at Penn, Caitlin Goodman at Free Library, and Kate Harcourt at Columbia along with many other support personnel who help keep everything running smoothly. Deserving of special mention here are the staff at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) at Penn and the Digital Imaging Lab at Columbia, who photograph everything, as well as the Digital Content team at Penn, who make everything available on OPenn, and at Columbia who add the holdings to the Internet Archive.
Andrea-Nunez: She is the photographer for this project at Penn. Here, she is photographing a Shāhnāmah from Free Library.
Do you have any advice for researchers who plan to use these collections?
Many of these manuscripts have been languishing unattended for a good, long while. Therefore, the time is right to poke around, find fun things to study, and bring the knowledge to the public. Browse the collections! I’m sure you’ll find something that interests you. So far, things that have stuck in my head while cataloging are that Columbia holds quite a number of teaching texts, and math and science works, in addition to some rather rare items, like a commentary in Aljamiado (Ms. Or. 515) and a forgery (Ms. Or. 388) produced in Palermo in the late 18th century. A blog post from the Columbia library gives some details about the collectors who provided most of the collection and some of what you will find in it. The Free Library has an excellent collection of illustrated manuscripts, including one illustrated version of part of the life of Emperor Akbar which is quite different from anything I’ve seen before (Lewis O 45). Penn and Bryn Mawr each have rather eclectic collections with some unique items. What immediately comes to mind from Penn is a Qur’ān that was copied in Malta (Ms. Codex 1904) and a divination book that has some fun illustrations (Ms. Codex 1898) and from Bryn Mawr a Shāhnāmah that is in an excellent state of semi-finishedness (BMC 65) with illustrations in all stages of development. Haverford has a good collection of Syriac manuscripts along with some Arabic and Persian, one of which a former owner has decorated with a number of rather awesome marginal doodles (Haverford College, Quaker & Special Collections mss. RH 66). The project is only half done, though, so more interesting things will surely be turning up!
Columbia_MsOr515: Folio 4v, Risālah, late 16th century. Text in Aljamiado, Spanish in Arabic letters.
For those of you browsing the digital collections, OPenn is a great repository, but it can look a little bare bones if you are used to the page-turning type of digital repository. With that in mind, if you go to the OPenn site you can read the introduction to find out how to use the repository and cite the works . You can then browse by repository , or, for this collection you can go to ‘Curated Collections’ and then to ‘Manuscripts of the Muslim World’ . Once you are there, you can search by Shelfmark, or browse through the holdings. The images, records, and metadata are all there for the taking. Please do help yourselves; it is all open access.
What are some challenges you’ve encountered in cataloging these manuscripts?
No one can be expert in all aspects of Islamicate manuscripts, and for a collection like this one, which is eclectic, spans 10 centuries, and covers areas from West Africa to India, I frequently run into things I’ve not seen before and for which I have very little reference. Thankfully, there is a growing set of resources for Islamicate manuscripts. There are still large areas, however, that are yet to be studied more fully. Perso-Indian manuscripts are one obvious example. I am not familiar with the tradition from my own training or research, but they exist in these particular collections in fairly significant numbers, and I am undoubtedly missing nuances of the copies and history as I catalog. Illustrated manuscripts present another type of challenge since I have had only minimal art historical training. I ask for outside help about the manuscripts with which I have difficulties, but sometimes answers are slow to come. I hope that having all the manuscripts available publicly will encourage people to get in touch with suggested revisions and improvements to the records, especially with regard to the structural metadata for illustrations. Another challenge has been with languages that I cannot read, but which form part of the collection; fortunately, volunteers have come to my rescue in cases like that. The project has been lucky, and I am extremely grateful, that so many people have been willing to donate their time and expertise when we need it. I hope the volunteers will continue to contribute their input.
What is your favorite manuscript you’ve worked on so far?
I don’t have a favorite, because there are cool things about each of the manuscripts I’ve worked on so far. I like anything that is a bit of a challenge, for which I need to do some digging. I also like anything that teaches me something new (so that is basically every manuscript out there). I also like finding connections between these manuscripts and manuscripts in other repositories, for example shared owner’s notes or stamps, or a scribe who copied one of these manuscripts and who I can actually then find listed elsewhere. The collections in the project were not built very systematically and so these connections do not often appear, so when they do, it is particularly nice. I also quite like it when the manuscripts seem like they’ve had a long, interesting life—when they have lots of marginalia, for example, or numerous owner’s notes, or tipped in notes and explanations. All of that is fun.
Could you tell us a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of working with digital images of manuscripts?
Since the project is based at Penn, I don’t actually see the Columbia manuscripts in person, for the most part. I therefore catalog their holdings from digital images and preliminary records that graduate students at Columbia have been learning to create. This has the advantage of letting me work remotely, but the disadvantage of obscuring some elements that would be noticeable in person. Knowledge of the paper is the most obvious drawback to digital images. You cannot look through a digital image as you would a piece of paper to see watermarks and laid and chain lines, for example. It is also more difficult to tell anything about the weight or texture of paper. Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether it has been blind-ruled or not. So, that’s a drawback. Another drawback is size distortion that comes about via digital images. A side effect of having all the images show up the same size on the monitor is that I sometimes lose track of whether I’m looking at a pocket-sized or a monumentally-sized Qurʾān, for example. That isn’t the fault of the digitizers or anything, and the measurements are of course provided along with the images, but it is easy to forget and think of all the books as the same size when they aren’t in front of you in person. A benefit of digital images, though, is the manipulability of them, which is to say they can be enlarged, cropped, rotated, and flicked through quickly without doing damage to the item. That aspect of digital images has been supremely useful in this project for reading small text, scribbly notes, for magnifying portions of the page for detail.
Is it possible for people to contribute to MMW?
In the sense that people can contribute their observations about the manuscripts, yes! Contribution is welcome and encouraged. Please do look at the digital images and decipher things that still need deciphering. Owner’s notes for example, stamps, other notes that were illegible to me, but might be legible to you, identifying what’s going on in an illustration so that I can update the structural metadata. In that sense, yes, we welcome contributions. In fact, if you have observations about provenance agents (owners, scribes, buyers, sellers, borrowers, lenders, readers, brokers, waqf donors/recipients, etc.) that you can identify in any of these manuscripts and you want to enter that information, along with the transcribed note, into the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, that would be a significant help.
Penn_LJS405: Folio 1v, copy of Tasʹhīl al-naẓar wa-taʻjīl al-ẓafar, 14th century? This is an example of a leaf covered in owner’s notes. Help transcribing this type of thing is welcome and can be added to the Schoenberg Database by you, yourself! Please contribute.
Dr Kelly Tuttle is the project cataloger for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World grant. She is located at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and is reachable via email at tuttlek@upenn.edu. You can also follow the project on Twitter: @MmwProject.
