In close cooperation, Dr. Frederik Elwert, Digital Humanities Coordinator of CERES, and Dr. Walter Young, former Fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Dynamiken der Religionsgeschichte zwischen Europa und Asien, have produced a digital edition of the ʿAyn al-Naẓar. The ʿAyn al-Naẓar is a treatise by Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 722/1322) on certain logical elements of Islamic dialectical disputation theory.

The edition is an example of how digital methods can be integrated into humanities methodology. At the core of the work is a careful philological examination of the textual witnesses and their differences. In contrast to the classical print edition, however, the medium in which the results of the philological investigation are recorded differs. With the help of the established guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, the scholarly statements about the text are recorded in a formal structure in XML format. In a second step, this abstract form is converted into a usable version. The web as a medium allows experimentation with new forms of interaction and user guidance.

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