Autobiography of Omar ibn Said
August 2023
A digitally enriched original edition of an Arabic manuscript
Omar ibn Said was a West African scholar who was kidnapped from his home and sold into slavery in the Carolinas in 1807. In the 1830s, he wrote an autbiographical essay in Arabic – a unique artifact of American history as one of the few slave narratives not written in English. The existence of this text speaks to the strong tradition of literature and education in the parts of Africa being raided as part of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, a powerful counter to many of the narratives that existed in the US during ibn Said’s time. It’s short length also makes it a potentially useful document to explore as part of an American history unit at the secondary level. The challenge of course, is that few American highschool students can read an Arabic manuscript.
This project started as a group translation. While the document itself is in the public domain, most of the Enlish translations are under copy-write or indirect, obscuring interesting aspects of the text. Working with a team of Arabic students, I helped create a new translation. Then, as part of my work at The Perseus Project, I prepared a new, enriched, CTS-compliant edition for the 6th generation of the Perseus Digital library that incorporated an alignment with our translation, a transliteration, treebanks, and token level annotations.
While the full work hasn’t yet been published on Beyond Translation, here is a poster I presented at the Greater Boston Digital Research and Pedagogy Symposium with more details about the project.
Topics
- Digital Humanities
- Digital Libraries
- Syntax Trees
- Translation Alignment
Technologies Used
- CAMeL tools
- Palmyra
- UGARIT
- Stanza
- TEI Markdown
Challenges & Learnings
Lots of parts of this project were manual, from the translation, to the treebanking, to the alignment, it was all very old school DH. At the same time, it was a great way to learn about the process and what goes into making these sorts of curated digital editions. It was also (surprise, surprise) the inspiration for my later attempts at automating the process.