Project title: Barlaam and Josaphat in Arabic Literature and Culture
Link to the project’s website: https://barlaamandjosaphat.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk

This project focuses on Arabic literature and culture. The story of Barlaam and Josaphat was quite popular, and between the sixth and seventeenth centuries, it was translated into several languages, allowing it to circulate among different cultures and religions across Eurasia.

The project Barlaam and Josaphat in Arabic Literature and Culture fits into all three stages of Johanna Drucker’s framework: materials, processing, and presentation.

It engages with the materials stage because the manuscripts will be published online, making them computationally traceable.

Additionally, the project uses ediarum, an online tool for editing manuscripts developed at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin, Germany). This reflects Drucker’s processing stage. The ediarum platform will not only feature digital images of the manuscripts but also full transcriptions of the Arabic texts, English translations of selected manuscripts, analytical metadata, and bibliographic information.

This processing also represents the stage of presentation, as the completed work will be shared across different platforms.