KARACHI: Digital curation, a process by which digital assets are preserved and archived, is vital for cultural preservation and will contribute towards preserving the South Asian heritage, said Dr Sean Pue on Wednesday.
The Michigan State University associate professor was speaking at a lecture on ‘Computational Approaches to Urdu Poetry’ organised by Habib University.
Introducing the speaker at the Tariq Rafi Lecture Theatre, Habib University School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences acting dean Dr Nauman Naqvi said Dr Pue is a torchbearer of the study of Urdu literary modernism and his projects will be the watershed for the preservation and rediscovery of our literary heritage.
Dr Pue, a literary historian and digital humanist, has worked on numerous projects pertaining to the computation of traditional and modern Urdu poetry through bio-informatic algorithms. The purpose, he said, is to make the computer artificially capable of transliterating, translating, interpreting and referencing Urdu poetry through the study of form.
“We transcribed 3,314 lines of Diwan-e-Ghalib for our project, Desertful of Roses,” he said. “Once the meter of the poetry is determined, it can be visualised in numerous ways.” Dr Pue argued that such tabulation is vital to map out the evolution of poetic forms and understand the politics of modernist Urdu poetry.
