Glaser Collection - Open Access

The project was funded through the Go!Digital 2.0 grant from the Austrian National Foundation (GD2016/04).

The collection of the Austrian scholar and explorer Eduard Glaser (1855-1908) was acquired by the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1910. The epigrapher and specialist in South-Arabian languages collected a remarkable amount of medieval Arabic manuscripts, stone inscriptions, now scattered across Europe, and around 3000 squeezes of the non-transportable stone monuments, but also photographs and glass-negatives, diaries, notes, maps, and some manuscripts of historical importance. The Academy owns some of the latter precious documents of the 1880s and 1890s and this project will digitally preserve, catalogue and link them to existing data collections such as the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Inscriptions (DASI) in Pisa. Moreover, the international research community – most researchers in this field are located abroad – will be able to access the digital objects in order to work on them. They can choose to download them in high or low quality and they can contribute their research results. They will mark one further step towards the integration of the History and Culture of South Arabia into the field of Oriental Studies and will help to give a fuller historical background from 1000 BCE till the rise of the Islam. This applies, above all, to the glass-negatives and photographs with historical significance, the five barely explored diaries and one manuscript (‘Streiflichter’) with their ethnological, historical and linguistic documentation. All these items, are catalogued, digitized and visualized in a searchable way in a web-application with a geographical map-search.

Project Team

Project manager: Petra Aigner
Scientific co-workers: George Hatke (inscriptions), Ronald Ruzicka (squeezes-coordination)
Technical co-workers: Moisés Hernandez-Cordero (3D Scanning), Mehmet Emir (W. Hein’s records), Christoph Schodl (photographs)
Free-lancer: David Aigner (photographs), Anton Kungl (TEI, Geonames)
Technical cooperation: ACDH-CH: Christoph Hoffmann (Axiell, Web-application), Peter Andorfer (TEI)
Cooperations: ACDH-CH, University of Vienna, Institute for Oriental Studies, DASI, Saba-Web

Illustration
Photograph: ÖAW, BAS:IS, Glaser Collection, AT-OeAW-BA-3-27-P-0503, 'Arabischer Bauer der Seile dreht'