Presse

The core ritual of the Zoroastrian tradition is the Yasna. Its oldest verses date from the third millennium BCE and are conducted in languages that have been extinct for around two thousand years. To understand the meaning of the Yasna, we must not only delve through ancient manuscripts, but observe the sacred traditions that have survived by being passed down through generations.

This has formed the research focus at the heart of The Multimedia Yasna (MUYA) Project, funded by the European Research Council and hosted at the Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies at SOAS. A diverse team of linguists, religious scholars, IT experts and language documentarians at MUYA, together with the filmmakers at Chouette Films, have been closely examining the Yasna ritual in both its visual and written forms. The vision throughout has been to bring the ancient traditions, intricate practices, and forgotten languages of Zoroastrianism into the public eye through an in-depth exhibition for everyone to enjoy.

The experts from TCDH in Trier develop editorial tools for MUYA. The adaptation of the Online Transcription Editor (OTE) to transcribe liturgical manuscripts of the Aveesta has been completed and is now being used by the MUYA team to transcribe manuscripts.

The print publications will be published by the publisher Brill. Supported by MUYA team member Martin Sievers ( TCDH Trier), MUYA's SOAS team is going to produce camera-ready copies using the software LaTeX, which is the software used by Brill. The tools in LaTeX have been developed, including macros and a Zotero database Team members are working on their commentaries of difficult words.

Im Masterstudiengang Digital Humanities, den das Fach Computerlinguistik und Digital Humanities in Kooperation mit dem Trier Center for Digital Humanities unter Beteiligung weiterer Fächer (Informatikwissenschaften, Germanistik, Anglistik, Phonetik, Kunstgeschichte) anbietet, wurde im Rahmen der Förderinitiative „Innovative Lehre“ der Koordinationsstelle E-Learning das Projekt Lehren und Lernen im Virtuellen Museum – Digitale Geisteswissenschaften innovativ vermittelt gefördert und dieser Wissenschaftsfilm zum Projekt konnte entstehen.

Ein Beitrag von Dr. Vera Hildenbrandt zum 60-seconds-science-countdown über das Projekt "Vernetzte Korrespondenzen".