Digital Averroes Research Environment

DARE

Type of site	Virtual research environment
Owner	Thomas-Institut, University of Cologne
Created by	Andreas Speer
Website	dare.uni-koeln.de
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

The Digital Averroes Research Environment^[1] (DARE), funded by the DFG, is a virtual research environment concerned with the works of Averroës or Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rušd.

DARE aims to provide scholars with the digitized manuscripts and incunables of Averroes's works (around 60,000^[2] as of April 2013), as well as edited full texts,^[3] where applicable in all three language traditions of Averroes's works: Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. A comprehensive bibliography^[4] complements the corpus.

Content

The aim of the Digital Averroes Research Environment is to collect and edit the works of Averroes by making digital editions of his works, and images of all textual witnesses, including manuscripts, incunabula, and early prints, online accessible. The main benefit of the DARE project is the so-called chunks. Each chunk represents a given section of a certain work of Averroes, which can be traced in each other manifestation. By clicking through the different digitized sections, the patched-in section follows automatically the chosen chunk.

Technical background

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) forms the backbone of DARE's data. The structure of the texts, the manuscript descriptions, the bibliography and the chunks of the full texts are all encoded in TEI. DARE itself runs in a Drupal-content management system (CMS), and the XML server is Xeletor,^[5] a highly scalable and performance-oriented XML server, whose development was also in part funded by DARE. As with all software developed in the course of the project, Xeletor is licensed under the LGPL.

Literature

• Poster DH2012

References

1. DARE Main Page
2. Manuscripts and incunabula of Averroes's works
3. Works of Averroes
4. Bibliography of Averroes-related literature
5. Xeletor