The research methods for achieving MUYA’s four objectives combine approaches from Digital Humanities, Philology and Linguistics into four inter-related work-packages (WP):

 

Work-package 1 will focus on the performance and teaching of ritual and involve filming and studying the ritual performance and teaching practices in priestly schools. It will produce an online edition of the film of the full Yasna ritual (including Paragna) with subtitles of the recitation text in Roman characters, an English translation and interactive hotspots providing background information on the ritual. For transcription and annotation we will use BOLD (Basic Oral Language Documentation).

 

Work-package 2 will develop a suite of electronic tools for editing Avestan texts. Research teams based at the Universities of Trier, Birmingham and Münster will produce an entirely new collaborative research environment providing a platform for this and future editions of Avestan texts.

 

Work-package 3 involves the production of full-text transcriptions of manuscripts using a customised Online Transcription Editor which automatically encodes the text in Extensible Markup Language (XML) according to the fifth version of the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P5). It is envisaged that past and present university students with knowledge of Avestan and Pahlavi will be able to index, transcribe, and mark features of manuscript pages and help us build a more complete manuscript repository.

 

Work-package 4 will carry out automatized manuscript collation (using CollateX), evaluation and genealogical analysis of text witnesses and text constitution and analyse the datasets produced by electronic processes with philological methods of textual criticism and linguistic analysis.