Have you found your Syriac course suddenly converted to an online course? If so, the Digital Syriac Corpus is here to help! The following overview provides a few suggestions for how the Digital Syriac Corpus might form part of an online instruction plan.

What is the Digital Syriac Corpus?

The Digital Syriac Corpus (hereafter DSC) is an online repository of digitized, open-access Syriac texts. These texts have been transcribed—some from older print editions, and some directly from manuscripts—into Word documents and subsequently transformed into XML documents according to the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) standards. These texts are then displayed as regular HTML web pages through the DSC website. The DSC is completely free to use, and it requires no user login or special technical skills.

How do I access the DSC and what is available?

Simply navigate to the home page (syriaccorpus.org). The landing page (see image below) will show you a basic search bar, some information about the project, and a few menu options at the top.

From the home page, you have a few options for how to proceed. You can use the search bar to search for an author’s name (Aphrahat, Ephrem, Jacob of Serugh, etc.) or for a particular word that might show up in a title (martyrdom, history, letter, etc.). The search results page will display all the texts that match the search term, and depending on what you searched, can be narrowed or refined in various ways. For instance, if you search for “letter,” you will get several results, and you can narrow down those results by author:

If you’d rather not begin with a random search, you can use the “Browse” menu item at the top of the home page to search the DSC offerings in other ways. When you click on Browse, it will navigate you to a new page (see below). The default browse menu is sorted by author. For loading speed purposes, this page will only show a few authors at a time, so if you have “All” selected, you can scroll through the page results, or you can limit the results by each letter of the alphabet.

You can also switch to browsing the DSC by title, either in English or Syriac, by toggling the tab choices above the browse results.

In terms of coverage, the DSC makes a wide range of texts available. Chronologically, there are texts from the earliest era of Syriac literature (2nd/3rd century) all the way up to the 14th century. In terms of genre, there are memre, madroshe, histories, homilies, martyrdoms, letters, grammars, polemics, biblical writings, apocryphal writings, liturgical writings, monastic writings, and hagiographies. In other words, there’s something for everyone!

How do I use the DSC?

Once you’ve navigated around a bit to see what kinds of texts we offer, it may also be useful to provide a quick orientation to what you’ll see on the page display for any given text.

As an example, here is a page display from an example text, Aphrahat, Demonstration 1: On Faith:

At the top, the title and (if applicable) author information is displayed. On the left-hand side, there are usually two boxes, one with a variety of radio buttons that can toggle various aspects of the text display, and one with a table of contents (usually with section heading numbers). These boxes may not show up on some pages, or they may contain different types of toggle switches. The content of these boxes is entirely dependent upon the information that was transcribed in the source document.

The center column of the page displays the text in question, and the right-hand column contains various pieces of information regarding the source and status of the text.

There are also a few useful buttons at the top of the right-hand column:

The “corrections” button will open a dialogue box in which users correct any errors found on the page. The “copy” button will copy the entire Syriac text to the user’s clipboard for easy pasting (into a word processor document, for example). The printer icon button will prompt the user’s device to either print or save a printable version of the text. The “TEI” button will show the user the underlying XML/TEI document (though you may have to adjust your browser settings to view this properly), and finally the “Text” button will automatically download a plain text file (.txt) of the Syriac text on that page. These tools may come in handy, depending on how one decides to use the DSC as a teaching resource.

There is one more thing to know about the page display: the default font is Estrangelo Edessa (one of the Beth Mardutho fonts). However, if you prefer to read in one of the other scripts, you can click on the “Font” drop down menu at the top right of any text page and select either “Serto Batnan” (for the Western script) or “East Syriac Adiabene” (for the Eastern script). Note: some texts have Western vowels, and some texts have Eastern vowels, but these vowels do not change when you change the font. You do not need to have these fonts installed on your device for them to display properly.

Some ideas for using the DSC for online instruction

The following are just a few ideas for how the DSC might be incorporated (either temporarily or permanently!) into Syriac syllabi. These ideas could be modified in a number of ways, depending on the needs of your students, and on whether you’re meeting synchronously online or assigning work asynchronously.

1) Just practice reading! At the most basic level, the DSC exists to make texts freely available to the world. Critical and print editions of texts can be costly, and if you relied on using PDFs or library copies, you may find yourself cut off from resources. This is one way that the DSC can help! We have plenty of texts that would be useful for Syriac students of any level to work with.

As an added bonus to help readers gain vocabulary proficiency, every Syriac word in the DSC is automatically linked to SEDRA, the online Syriac dictionary run by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Clicking on a word will bring up a small display box that will provide basic grammatical information and glosses for the word. Note: this is an imperfect system, and some words will not return any results. The DSC is not yet morphologically tagged (though that is a long-term dream), which makes it difficult to do more in-depth analysis at the word level.

2) Gain familiarity with other scripts. Regardless of whether you initially taught students with Estrangelo or either the Western/Eastern script, the unique ability of the DSC to toggle between fonts provides an excellent opportunity to improve skills with any of the scripts. Likewise, if you would like students to practice reading texts with no vowels at all or with either Western or Eastern vowels, there are plenty of texts to choose from. Many texts, including Aphrahat’s Demonstrations for example, do not have any vowels and would be useful for pronunciation practice. Some texts with Western vowels include the Peshitta New Testament, some of Ephrem’s works, and the Book of Steps. For texts with Eastern vowels, the memre of Narsai are available and fully vocalized. In my own Syriac course, I used the DSC in a synchronous Zoom meeting to let students practice reading unvocalized texts.

3) Check our texts against a print edition. If you want to give your students some experience with close reading and comparing versions, you could assign them a text from the DSC alongside the source edition. Most of the texts in the corpus are in out-of-copyright editions, so they are readily available online. This gives students a chance to do some close reading of texts, and it would also be very helpful for the DSC project (we know that there are typos, and we’d love to correct them!). Remember that handy “Corrections” button mentioned above?

4) Send students on a word search. You can use the search bar (the main one on the home page or the one at the top of any page display) to search for a Syriac word. Note: if you do not have the capability to type in Syriac on your device, you can click the keyboard icon to the right of the search bar and then choose a keyboard style from the dropdown menu. This will produce a small on-screen keyboard that you can click to type in Syriac. This sort of lexical assignment could show students the wide range of uses for any given lexical token.

5) Have students type a transcription of a text. Working with some more advanced students? Give them the chance to transcribe a Syriac text and then submit it for inclusion in the DSC! We welcome any and all texts transcribed by scholars of any level. The names of all transcribers involved will be included in the metadata of the file and displayed on the page when the text is made available. More information about possible contributions to the DSC can be found here.

If you experiment with any of the ideas above, or if you have already used the DSC in your Syriac courses, we would love to hear about it. You can email us at info@syriaccorpus.org, or you can find us on Twitter at @syriaccorpus.

James E. Walters is the General Editor of the Digital Syriac Corpus. You can follow him on Twitter @jedwardwalters.