Digital Averroes Research Environment

DARE is a first funded by the DFG virtual research environment with the aim of the work of Averroes or Abū al - Waleed Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd in the form of a digital library and then a digital edition in all three linguistic traditions ( Arabic, Hebrew and Latin) to make parallel and delivery of digital images, text and other information and tools available online.

DARE currently has a corpus of about 60,000 digital copies of manuscripts and incunabula, as well as full-text versions of many works of Averroes. A bibliography completes the offer.

As part of the project an international Averroes Congress was held in 2011.

Content focus

The DARE project has made ​​it his task to bring together all the representations of the works of Averroes in a virtual research environment and to provide the research community. The project, which is currently still in the development phase, aims to access the entire relevant material - manuscripts, prints, editions, translations, research literature - the works of Averroes allow. Through partnerships with libraries, institutions, and editorial projects, in which the various representations are or were produced, have already been created more than 60,000 digitized and made available in digital form. Since DARE allows permanent addressability, the project -to-date research opportunities and the possibility of integration of the materials in other research contexts opened. Of particular interest for the work with the texts are the chunks - a project internally generated concordance by which the respective texts can be read synoptically in the representations.

Technical implementation

The basic format for all textual data on the de facto standard used for the TEI Guidelines. Both the structure of texts, manuscripts and incunabula and their descriptions are stored in TEI -compliant XML. The full texts are available in chunks, units of meaning of a few lines to paragraphs divided. These chunks are again identified on the Bilddigitalisaten, so that a link between text and digitized point is made. In this way it is possible the huge corpus of more than 60,000 pictures with the matching text to link and thus to enable parallel reading of the traditions of different languages ​​, textual witnesses and reproducing forms.

DARE itself runs in a Drupal CMS; as a back -end for XML data has been developed with Xeletor a separate, highly scalable, high-performance XML server, which, like all software developed in the project, is under an open license.

Further planning

In 2015, with funding from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung further 100 manuscripts, including from the British Library and the Bodleian Library, digitized and three other full texts in the Arabic and Hebrew language tradition can be created.