About the Digital Syriac Corpus

Logo

The Digital Syriac Corpus logo incorporates the Syriac letter ܛ (ṭet) as an allusion to the Syriac word ܛܟܣܐ (ṭaksa) meaning "order, series, or arrangement.” Our aim is that the digitally arranged ܛܟܣܐ of this corpus will offer scholars new ways to explore the rich heritage of Syriac literature.

Project Overview

The Digital Syriac Corpus is a freely available, open-access, online repository for digitized editions of Syriac texts. All of the texts in the Digital Syriac Corpus have been converted into TEI/XML formatting for display and robust searching.

Objectives for the Digital Syriac Corpus

Access

Many Syriac texts are available only in manuscripts or in print editions that are held only by top-tier research libraries. As such, these texts are often inaccessible to both scholars and members of Syriac heritage communities. We hope that this project will help improve access to these texts worldwide.

Preservation

In addition to the preservation work being done by libraries and archivists in libraries around the world to protect the physical manuscripts containing these texts, we hope that the Digital Syriac Corpus will serve as a digital repository for the preservation of Syriac texts for future generations. Moreover, we hope that this archive of texts will become a resource for the preservation of the Syriac language among heritage communities around the world.

Data Sharing

All documents in the Digital Syriac Corpus are released under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0) and all the Syriac base texts are considered in the public domain. The TEI/XML encoded documents are all available on GitHub, and we welcome other scholars to use our data for new projects. The Digital Syriac Corpus currently shares data (following the Linked Open Data model) with Syriaca.org, especially the Syriac Biographical Dictionary and the forthcoming New Handbook of Syriac Literature.