Welcome to the Persian Digital Library!

At the University of Maryland’s Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, our Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD) team wants to shepherd the cultural production of the Persianate world into the digital age and radically transform the ways Persian language, literature and culture are learned, studied and preserved in the 21st century.

Central to this mission is the development of the Persian Digital Library (PDL): the first machine-actionable premodern Persian corpus.

The PersDig@UMD project team recently completed the PDL pilot project (details below), and is now preparing to launch a second, much larger implementation stage of corpus building in collaboration with the KITAB Project of Aga Khan University (London) and the OpenArabic Project of Universität Leipzig. More details on this multi-institutional corpus-building initiative can be found at the Islamicate Texts Initiative (ITI) website.

What did the Persian Digital Library (PDL) Pilot Project do?

• created an open-access corpus of more than 60,000 Persian poems (and a few prose texts) from the raw texts provided by Ganjoor and formatted them all according to the CapiTainS canonical text services (CTS) standards.
• validated PDL texts with the CapiTainS Tool Suite of Perseus Digital Library and deposited them in their CTS repository.
• completed first application of CapiTainS canonical text services (CTS) standards to Persian literature.
• integrated the open-source Persian morphological analyzer/lemmatizer, Hazm, and the Steingass Persian dictionary into Alpheios and Arethusa.

Note: All texts, programs, and technology developed during this project will be open access/open source and will be made publicly available for everyone in the world to download, use, reuse, and adapt.

PDL Research Component: Distant Reading Persian Literature

The Distant Reading Persian Literature project is a collaborative research initiative led by Matthew Thomas Miller of the University of Maryland's Roshan Institute for Persian Studies. Utilizing PDL texts, collaborators are currently leveraging stylometric analysis and topic modeling to study authorial attribution and macro generic and stylistic transformations in medieval and early modern Persian poetry. Initial results will be published in the fall of 2016.

Anyone interested in collaborating with the Distant Reading Persian Literature project should contact Matthew Thomas Miller (mtmiller@umd.edu).

Support or Contact

If you have questions about the corpus or you are interested in contributing, please contact the PDL project manager, Samar Ata (sata@umd.edu).