The May issue of the Digital Initiatives & Technology Newsletter focuses on this year's third and final digitization project using Arcadia funding – that is the digitization of Hán Nôm Handwritten and Woodblock Manuscripts held in the Maurice Durand Collection.
Within this fascinating collection, a scholar can find handwritten and woodblock texts in Hán Nôm, a writing method for the Vietnamese language adapted from and incorporating modified Chinese characters in use from the 13th until the 20th century. The Maurice Durand collection contains Hán Nôm texts, which are divided into two groups: Series 1 contains 35 hand sewn woodblock or handwritten brush ink volumes; and Series 2 is made up of 169 bi-lingual parallel-script notebooks handwritten in fountain pen. These cover classical Vietnamese literature and historical texts in Hán Nôm and Quốc Ngữ, the modern Romanized Vietnamese script. Support from the Arcadia grant to the Southeast Asia Collection will provide for the digitization of both series and give patrons open access to the series' distinctive content. Read more...