PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED

“Creating a Syriac Digital Thesaurus: The Simtho Portal”

George A. Kiraz, Institute for Advanced Study/Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute

George A. Kiraz is the founder and director of Beth Mardutho. He founded Beth Mardutho in 1992 as an institution dedicated to furthering the study of Syriac and the Syriac tradition throughout the world. He has personally directed many projects through Beth Mardutho, and his own personal library forms a significant portion of the Beth Mardutho Research Library.  George has taught Syriac in Princeton, Rutgers, and the POLIS Institute (Jerusalem). He has an MPhil and PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where he wrote his thesis on computing the morphology of Arabic and Syriac.

Kiraz is also a Research Associate in Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study.

Simtho: The Syriac Thesaurus is a medium-size database of Syriac literary texts. The Beta version was launched at AAR/SBL in San Diego in 2019 and consists of 7.3 million tokens (ca. 6.5 million words). Users can search the corpus using different methods: simple word and phrase search, regular expressions, and a Corpus Query Language. Search operations can be filtered by a rich set of metadata fields such as author, composition date periods, genre, poetic meter (when applicable), and much more. In addition to concordance results, users can find collocations and frequencies of occurrence. Search results can be saved or exported in text and XML formats. Simtho is freely available online. Volunteers who are interested in helping can read the Call for Volunteers and Call for Texts sections below.

Co-Sponsored by:

Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, Program in Medieval Studies, and Geniza Lab