Matthew Thomas Miller

New Course: Sufism: History, Literature, and Politics of Islamic Mysticism

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sufism: History, Literature, and Politics of Islamic Mysticism is an advanced introduction to the study of the history, literature, and politics of Sufism, the Islamic “mystical” mode of piety, from its origins to the modern period. In this course we will consider Sufism as a diverse cultural formation through the lens of power, gender, sexuality, the body/embodiment, affect/emotion, orientalism, and the senses while also deeply engaging its history, literature, and philosophical dimensions. The course does not require any prior knowledge of Islamicate cultures and languages.

Course: Sufism: History, Literature, and Politics of Islamic Mysticism

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

NSF Awards $600K Grant to Fund Innovative Machine Learning Approaches to Automatic Transcription of Islamic Manuscripts

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The University of Maryland will co-lead (with the University of California, San Diego) a grant totaling nearly $600K from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that will fund innovative research on machine learning methods to improve the automatic transcription of Persian and Arabic manuscripts…Read more here and here.

$1.75 Million Mellon Grant Funds Phase II of the OpenITI AOCP Project

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The University of Maryland has received a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue development of open-source technology, digital standards, and corpus production to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu…Read more here and here.

$100K Mellon Grant Funds Continuation of OpenITI Persian & Arabic Digitization Project

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to support the continued development of user-friendly, open-source software capable of creating digital texts from Persian and Arabic books…Read more here.

NEH Awards $282,905 Grant for Advancing Persian and Arabic Manuscript HTR to Roshan Institute at UMD

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD) is proud to announce that we have received a Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in the amount of $282,905 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for our project entitled, “Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Improving Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script Manuscripts.” Matthew Thomas Miller will serve as the Principal Investigator of this project, with David Smith serving as the co-Principal Investigator.

For more information on the ACDC project and how it fits in with PersDig@UMD and the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative’s other projects, please see here and a thread on PI Miller’s Twitter thread here.

Also, please see the official NEH announcement.

OpenITI AOCP Team Receives a HathiTrust Research Center Advanced Collaborative Support Award

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Advanced OCR Catalyst Project team (more on this larger project here) is proud to announce that we have received a HathiTrust Research Center Advanced Collaborative Support Award for our project entitled, Detecting and Transcribing Arabographic Texts. Team member David Smith led this proposal, with Matthew Miller, Sarah Bowen Savant, and Maxim Romanov serving as co-Principal Investigators.

For more information, see the official announcement on the HathiTrust Digital Library site.

Other notable press coverage:

HathiTrust award goes to UMD researcher, team developing digital humanities software

OpenITI Receives $800,000 Grant from the Mellon Foundation for Persian and Arabic OCR

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OpenITI AOCP will create a new digital text production pipeline for Persian and Arabic texts.

In June 2019 the Mellon Foundation generously awarded the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) a $800,000 grant for the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative’s Arabic-script Optical Character Recognition Project (OpenITI AOCP).

The project is led by Matthew Thomas Miller (Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at UMD), Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna), Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University), David Smith (Northeastern University), and Raffaele Viglianti (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at UMD). SHARIAsource, a project of the Program in Islamic Law (PIL) at Harvard Law School (both led by Intisar Rabb), provided significant support for the initial technical infrastructure upon which this project will build (i.e., CorpusBuilder 1.0) and they will also play a leading role in the technical development portion of OpenITI AOCP.

OpenITI AOCP will catalyze the digitization of the Persian and Arabic written traditions by addressing the central technical and organizational impediments stymying the development of improved OCR for Arabic-script languages. Through a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities scholars, computer scientists, developers, library scientists, and digital humanists, OpenITI AOCP will forge CorpusBuilder 1.0—an OCR pipeline and post-correction interface — into a user-friendly digital text production pipeline with a wide range of new OCR enhancements and expanded text export functionality. The project will also include a series of workshops, a full corpus development pilot, and a Persian and Arabic typeface inventory, all of which will inform the development of the technical components in important ways.

For full details on OpenITI AOCP, see the project page here and the full project overview here.

Other notable press coverage:

New Software to Digitize Persian and Arabic Materials

Mellon Foundation Awards $2.8M for Research, Digitization in Humanities

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP)

SHARIAsource Partners at UMD & OpenITI Receive $800k Mellon Grant to Create Arabic OCR Tool

Course: Sex, Love, and Desire in Persian Poetry

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Sex, Love, and Desire in Persian Poetry will provide students with a survey of the permutations of desire—sexual to sacred, heteroerotic to homoerotic—in Persian literature from its earliest works (e.g., Shah-Nameh, Vis and Ramin) to modern “new poetry” (she’r-e now) (e.g., Farrokhzad, Shams). The course will be divided up into four units: (1) romantic epic; (2) Sufi “sacred” love literature; (3) bawdy verse and erotic advice literature; (4) modern “new” love poetry. The chronological and generic breadth of the course will enable us to study the ways in which authors of various times and places adapt and transform amorous themes for their own time and literary aims. We will also study the changing “politics of desire” (e.g., the highly political ways in which modern readers and literary critics have responded to the manifest homoerotic and other non-heteronormative forms of desire in premodern Persian literature). In addition to the readings/topics on the syllabus, students will have the opportunity to engage in their own independent research on a topic of their own choice related to Persian literature (in consultation with the instructor), which they will report on in the form of a class presentation and final project. The course neither presupposes nor requires any knowledge of the Persian language or prior coursework in Persian literature.

Please contact me if you are interested in reviewing the full syllabus.

Course: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Islamic World

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[Note: First taught in Spring 2017, revised Fall 2018]

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Islamic World is an advanced introduction to the study of the changing norms of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Islamicate world, past and present. Through engagement with primary source readings, recent scholarly studies, and theoretical literature from Gender and Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory, we will cover such topics as: Islamic sexual ethics; homo- and heteroerotic poetry and art of both the spiritual and profane varieties; transvestism, androgyny, and gender nonconformity in the medieval Islamic world; premodern Islamic medical and courtly advice literature on sex; and the construction of “sexuality” (homo- and heterosexuality) in the modern Middle East. The course does not require any prior knowledge of Gender and Sexuality Studies or Islamicate cultures and languages.

Please contact me if you are interested in reviewing the full syllabus.