The acronym "ATMO" refers to two successive projects aiming to analyze medical and other manuscripts, and to provide better access for the public to
materials in the Central Asian manuscripts. These materials were
collected by a number of Swedish scholars and donated by Prof. (and
Ambassador) Gunnar Jarring to the Lund University Library in Sweden,
which is participating in this project.
We focus on previously unscanned and untranslated manuscripts written in the the late Chaghatay language of the southern Tarim Basin, in what is today Xinjiang. In partnership with Lund University Library, we have scanned nearly 40% of the Jarring collection; when we began, only about 4% of the manuscripts had been scanned. We have been transcribing a large portion of these, and providing additional linguistic annotation (interlinear glossing) and translations for select manuscripts. Each of the two projects also has a focal manuscript, for which we create a digital edition.
ATMO-1 (2015-2018) The first project, ATMO-1 (Annotated Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online) was directed by Prof. Arienne M. Dwyer and Dr. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. We prioritized manuscripts relating to healing (broadly defined): composite handbooks of medical formulae, amulet formulae, and using trance mediums (shamans) and other everyday medical practices. Our focus manuscript was Prov. 351, A medical handbook. That handbook is available in several views, including one oriented towards digital humanists (with parallel views of Perso-Arabic text, Latin script transliteration, and an English gloss), and another geared towards linguists (in interlinear glossing format). We also scanned many manuscripts, created digital facsimiles of them, and then made these and their transcriptions available on this site. For selected manuscripts, we also provided translations and part of speech annotations.
ATMO-2 (2018-2021) The second project, ATMO-2 (Analyzing Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online) is directed by Prof. Arienne M. Dwyer and Co-Investigators Jeff Rydberg Cox and Sandra Kuebler. Its additional aims are to automate linguistic annotation (segmentation and POS annotation) and to use Network Analysis to evaulate the transmission of medical ideas across Eurasia. Like ATMO-1, in ATMO-2 we scanned selected manuscripts, and will continue to make transcriptions of selected scans, and linguistic annotation of select transcriptions available on this site. In ATMO-2, our focus manuscript is a 10 meter long Genealogical Scroll (Prov. 561). It is inherently a network diagram (of kinship and political relations) with a challenging structure to represent.
Both projects has been funded in large part by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Credit: Painting of Mahmud al-Kashgari © 1981 by Ghazi Emet.