News & Events
Archnet To Be Featured at Upcoming SHASS Digital Collaborative Session
On February 25, 2021, the AKDC will present “Archnet 3.0: Enhancing Archnet for Teaching in the Digital Humanities” as part of the SHASS Digital Teaching and Research Collaborative Sessions at MIT. SHASS Digital Teaching and Research Collaborative Sessions take place each Thursday from 4:30-5:30 during the term. What is “Archnet 3.0”? AKDC@MIT and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture are currently in the process of re-developing Archnet, a freely accessible resource focused on the built environment in societies influenced by Muslim culture. Archnet’s mission is to provide ready access to unique textual and media material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and...
AKDC@MIT and The Met Museum Collaborate to make images available on Archnet
The Aga Khan Documentation Center has collaborated with the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) to digitize, catalog, and make available a number of historical photographs of Islamic architecture. The photos, most of which date between the 1880s and 1950s, show some of the great monuments of the Islamic tradition, both general and detailed views, often before modern restoration projects. The first batch of nearly 300 photos is now available on Archnet. These are among the oldest of the collection, taken by pioneering photographers such as the Turkish photographer Pascal Sébah, his son Jean...
AKDC Staff participating in panel on Digital Humanities + Islamic Visual Culture in the annual conference of the College Art Association
Matt Saba, AKDC Visual Resources Librarian, a and Glaire Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh, have organized and will chair a panel on Digital Humanities + Islamic Visual Culture for the 109th Annual Conference of the College Art Association to be held online February 10-13, 2021. The panel is sponsored by the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA). The panel includes 4 presentations: “Soft Eyes: Software’s Visualities and Islamic Art History in the Digital Age” by Hussein Keshani, The University of British Columbia “Animating an Amulet: 3D Modeling, Materiality, and a Medieval Arabic Amulet Scroll”...
Archnet Content Manager invited to participate in “Preserving and conveying memory to foster Alterity.”
Michael Toler, Archnet Content Manager, has been invited to participate in a webinar, “Préserver et transmettre la mémoire pour ancre l’Altérité,” organized by the Ta’aruf Center of the Rabita Mohammedia Al Ulema in Morocco. The event takes place January 25-28, is part of a continuing dialogue on “how to resolve a number of tensions which have ossified the dialogue between cultures and religions. The issues around memory – how to preserve it and pass it on to the next generations – seem to be a major challenge for our societies in terms of peacebuilding and encouraging open-mindedness to the notion...
AKDC to offer Introduction to Islamic Calligraphy
In collaboration with calligrapher and graphic designer Sangeetha Kowsik, AKDC@MIT will offer an introductory workshop on “Arabic Calligraphy: An Artistic Journey from Kufic to Contemporary Design,” January 14, 2021 from 2 to 4 PM EST, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP). The workshop introduces a brief history of Arabic calligraphy, a tradition whose practice spans more than one thousand years and continues today, where it is globally recognized for its unique aesthetics of geometric proportion and sinuous curve. In the first part of this workshop, the most important of the classical Arabic scripts are introduced through famous examples of artworks,...