Resources

Here you’ll find a collection of short articles, tutorials, and links on topics related to my academic work. I’m putting these up here in the hopes that they may be helpful for other scholars.

Digital Humanities

Working with Persian texts in the digital humanities comes with its own set of challenges. Here I describe some of the tools, resources, and workflows that have worked well for me.

• Transliteration: An important part of our training is to master the transliteration systems used in our fields. In this tutorial, I cover some of the prominent methods and give instructions for setting up diacritics on your keyboard.
• Fonts: Hand-in-hand with transliteration comes the issue of fonts: some are better at representing special characters than others, and it’s an added plus if they integrate with or incorporate Arabic script as well. Here is an overview of the fonts I use.
• Software: Here I cover some of the software I use the most for drafting, research, note-taking, etc. A quick snapshot: Pandoc, Sublime Text, iA Writer, Zotero, XeLaTeX, BibTeX, Katib.
• Tutorials:
  • PDF management using Zotero
  • Arabic and Persian diacritics for Ubuntu keyboard
• Links:
  • Al-Raqamiyat: Digital Islamic History, by Maxim Romanov
  • Daring Fireball, an introduction to Markdown
  • Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown, by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff.
  • Persian Digital Humanities at the Roshan Institute, University of Maryland

Dictionaries

Dictionaries naturally play a huge role in philological and literary study. Here are the ones I turn to most frequently, starting with online and then print resources.

Online

• Vajehyab. An assemblage of Dehkhodā, Mo‘in, ‘Amid, and many other dictionaries. Alternative: Parsi.wiki.
• Farsi123
• Steingass: An excellent resource for classical Persian, though its online interface is a bit quirky. See my tutorial.
• Hayyim
• Arabic Almanac: Includes scans of Hans Wehr, Lane, Hava, Kazimirski, Hind/Badawi, and many, many more. Indispensable.
• Baheth: For all the major classical Arabic dictionaries (Lisān al-‘arab, al-Muḥīt, etc.)
• Indo-Persian:
  • Ghiyath al-Lughat: A sum of Indian lexicography
  • Lughat-i Kishori: Very useful for Indo-Persian texts
  • Farhang-i Jahangiri: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100350227
  • Burhan-i Qati’: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008398737

Print

• Farhang-e bozorg-e sokhan, Ḥasan Anvari (1381)

Calendars

• Muqawwim, by T.S. Beers: Converts between Gregorian, Julian, Hijri, Solar Hijri, and the Chinese-Uighur animal calendar.

Bibliographies / Filmographies

These are various lists of books, films, links, and other resources I have pulled together, mostly for the sake of my classes. NB that none of these are necessarily exhaustive or up-to-date.

• Shahnameh studies
• Modern Persian poetry
• Iranian cinema
  • List of Iranian films held at Michigan