A-label: African Languages Between the Lines
Notes on sub-Saharan languages written in Arabic script
A workflow for the analysis of Soninke Ajami manuscripts using the open-source software Tropy
This post lays out the software and workflow solutions that I use for analysing Soninke Ajami manuscripts. Together, they may be helpful for other researchers working on digitized manuscripts, especially Ajami manuscripts.
Continue reading “How to Analyse Soninke Ajami Manuscripts”A flexible and sustainable way to analyze and publish about Ajami manuscripts
I previously shared two technical notes explaining how to:
By following these two steps, you can digitize and extract Ajami data into a tabular format that is useful for further analysis using tools of corpus linguistics (e.g., SketchEngine).
But what happens if you are interested in preparing a version of the text that can be read and appreciated by another person?
Continue reading “How to prepare an aligned critical edition in plain text using Markdown”The conventions we use to transliterate African languages from Arabic to Latin script.
One of the hardest things about working on Ajami manuscripts is interpreting the African language that is written in the Arabic script. This is because oftentimes certain contrastive sounds (phonemes, nasalization, tone) are not marked.
Continue reading “Transliterating Ajami into the Latin script”Working through Ajami manuscripts can be slow-going. Here is a standard workflow using Tropy that can make it a little easier.
Working through Ajami manuscripts can be slow-going. One important tool in our workflow is the open-source software Tropy from the same people behind everyone’s favorite reference management software Zotero.
Continue reading “How to use Tropy to analyze Ajami manuscripts”We just released two working technical notes (in French) to help researchers get set up to use Tropy to analyze Ajami annotations/segments in West African manuscripts:
Continue reading “New Technical Notes for Using Tropy to Analyze Manuscripts (en français)”
