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BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:"The Multiplicity of Medieval Editions: Digital Approaches to the 
 “Middle Books” of Astronomy"\, a talk in the "DH in the History of Pre
 modern Sciences" symposium
DTSTART:20260715T120000Z
DTEND:20260715T210000Z
UID:https://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2026/07/the-multiplicity-of-medieval-
 editions-digital-approaches-to-the-middle-books-of-astronomy-a-talk-in-the
 -dh-in-the-history-of-premodern-sciences-symposium/
DESCRIPTION:\n\n  In the medieval Islamicate world\, the &quot\;Middle Boo
 ks&quot\; (Kutub al-Mutawassiṭāt) were a corpus of mathematical and ast
 ronomical treatises so-named because they were the works to be read betwee
 n Euclid&#x27\;s Elements and Ptolemy&#x27\;s Almagest. The original core 
 of this curricular canon was a series of ancient Greek works translated in
 to Arabic in the ninth century CE\, and evidence suggests that the Middle 
 Books grouping already existed in the lifetimes of their translators.The M
 iddle Books were not static over the subsequent centuries: rather\, their 
 didactic usage motivated the addition of new works to the grouping as well
  as the production of new editions of the component texts. The renowned as
 tronomer Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī notably produced his own edition of 
 the Middle Books in the thirteenth century\, and he was not the only schol
 ar to transform these texts.This talk presents how methods from the digita
 l humanities support research with the full multiplicity of the versions o
 f the Middle Books extant across Arabic manuscript collections. Machine-le
 arning tools like custom segmentation and handwritten text recognition (HT
 R) models facilitate working with the mathematical texts and diagrams at s
 cale\, even including treatises which lack modern critical editions. Text 
 alignment algorithms and other approaches find areas of overlap and points
  of departure between different manuscript texts\, quantifying the transfo
 rmations seen in different editions. Through these investigative tools\, w
 e can illuminate the transformations throughout the Middle Books tradition
 \; in these transformations\, we find contemporary scholarly and/or pedago
 gical contributions to the study of astronomy throughout the medieval Isla
 micate world.\n\n\nhttps://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2026/07/the-multiplici
 ty-of-medieval-editions-digital-approaches-to-the-middle-books-of-astronom
 y-a-talk-in-the-dh-in-the-history-of-premodern-sciences-symposium/
LOCATION:ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting\, Edinburgh
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