title	author	date
newspapers_thamarat-al-funun: read me	Till Grallert	2019-03-01

This repository contains bibliographic metadata for the newspaper Thamarāt al-Funūn published by ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Qabbānī in Beirut between 1875 and 1908.

Thamarāt al-Funūn

During the generation of metadata, I found a number of irregularities, which were supposedly due to printers' errors:

• #717 is missing. After #716 followed #718 using the established weekly publication schedule. #717 was thus never published

current state

• TEI file of an index based on an unpublished thesis by Hudā Ṣiyāḥ (Lebanese University).
  • 2018-01-07: added publication dates for 1264 issues
• Completed generation of metadata until:
  • vol.11, no.513 as TEI and MODS (2017-11-05)
  • vol.13, no.645 as TEI (2018-01-04)
  • 2018-01-07: added some 600-odd issues from previously generated metadata. The missing issues are recorded with comments following this pattern: <!-- gap of N issues between #N and #M -->. There are still some 400-500 issues missing.
  • 2018-07-04: filled the gaps of Nos. 696--718 and 866--1109
• Completed generation of individual TEI files
  • vol.11, no.513 (2017-11-05)
  • 2018-01-07: for all currently 1264 bibliographic entries
  • 2018-07-04: for all currently 1530 issues

to do

• generate metadata
  • 1150
  • 1213
  • 1232
  • 1266
  • 1362-1461
  • 1544
  • 1577-1586
  • 1606-1655
  • 1658
• generate individual TEI files

some technical details

This repository contains the following files:

1. a TEI XML file containing one <biblStruct> for each issue of Thamarāt al-Funūn. This file is produced through automatic iteration making use of this code developed for OpenArabicPE and manual validation against the digital facsimiles.
2. individual TEI files for every issue of Thamarāt al-Funūn. These are generated from the output of step 1 using the XSLT stylesheet generate_tei-from-biblstruct.xsl from the same repository. TEI files contain links to the locally available facsimiles.
3. a TEI edition of the index, where every entry is modelled as a <bibl>. Since the original index by Hudā Ṣiyāḥ does not contain publication dates, these have been added automatically through alignment with the information provided/produced in step 1.
4. all bibliographic data is then automatically converted from TEI XML to MODS XML for integration into reference management software etc (such as Zotero).
5. The TEI files for individual issues were converted to TSS XML for use with the now discontinued reference manager Sente.

the index

quality

• the author did not compile an index of headings or rather it is a combination of headings and her own summary of an article's content.
  • as a consequence, one cannot use the entries in the index to build a bibliographic database
• the index is far from complete!
  • ḥādithat [al-Jāmiʿ] al-Azhar:
    • one entry in the index
    • headlines in at least five issues: {thamarat-oib-23-1082;thamarat-oib-23-1084;thamarat-oib-23-1086;thamarat-oib-23-1089;thamarat-oib-23-1090}
  • ḥādithat Harsuk
    • headlines in at least eight issues: {thamarat-oib-1-21;thamarat-oib-1-22;thamarat-oib-1-23;thamarat-oib-1-24;thamarat-oib-1-25;thamarat-oib-1-26;thamarat-oib-1-27;thamarat-oib-1-28}
• entries are confusing
  • around 1900, Thamarāt al-Funūn ran a section titled ʿilm al-ijtimāʿ al-basharī (sociology)
    • the index contains
      • one reference to this section without naming the actual article title (p.50)
      • one faulty reference to an article in this section, without mentioning the section (p.142)
      • only two entries for #1306, #1308, issues of 8 pages.
      • only one entry for #1307, #1309