Encoding Western and Non-Western Names for Ancient Syriac Authors

Abstract

One of the major digital challenges of the Syriaca.org research project has been to encode and visualize personal names of authors in Middle Eastern languages (especially Syriac and Arabic). TEI-XML and HTML are digital standards for the encoding and visualization of cultural heritage data and have features for encoding names and displaying Middle Eastern languages. Because these formats were developed primarily for Western cultural data, however, representing our non-Western data in these formats has required complex adaptation particularly in regard to marking up name parts, customizing search algorithms, displaying bidirectional text, and displaying Syriac text with embedded fonts. These requirements have led us to develop small-scale systems that may be of use to other cultural heritage preservation projects involving names for ancient and, especially, non-Western entities.

Gateway to the Syriac Saints: A Database Project

“…Lucene also allows for the creation of custom analyzers as needed, as well as customizable weighting of elements in the index. In eXist-db multiple analyzers may be defined and used with different indexes (Gibson, Salesky, and Michelson 2015).…”