August 3, 2020
The DREAMSEA program has started to digitize manuscripts from Solok Regency in West Sumatra. The mission started on 14 July and will continue until 12 August 2020. The mission is under the leadership of Pramono, a philologist from Andalas University in Padang, West Sumatra. A number of experts from Manassa and from the State Islamic University Imam Bonjol and the State Institute for Islamic Studies Batusangkar have been added to the field team. This is the 19th mission and the first to be executed during the Covid-19 pandemic. While he was supervising the field, DREAMSEA data manager, M. Nida Fadlan […]
July 8, 2020
Dreamsea.co – DREAMSEA has resumed the digitisation of manuscripts from Cirebon after having halted the activity in early March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to finish the digitisation of these manuscripts, the activity was resumed on 6 and 7 July by strictly following a health protocol. The digitisation was resumed by using a health protocol in order to ensure the health and safety of the digitising team and the PPIM staff. M. Nida Fadlan, the DREAMSEA Data Manager and digitisation field manager expressed that it was very important to continue the digitisation by making sure that the […]
June 11, 2020
Shifting Landscapes: Remapping the Writing Traditions of Islamic Southeast Asia through Digitisation
ABSTRACT Studies of the languages and literatures of the Malay world of Nusantara have long been shaped by thecollections of manuscripts held in western institutions, which strongly reflect the interests of colonial officialswho formed them. A very different picture of the writing traditions of maritime Southeast Asia emerges froma survey of manuscripts still held in local communities digitised through the Endangered Archives Programmeand DREAMSEA. Primarily concerned with Islamic topics and often written in Arabic, the study of thesenewly-accessible collections has the potential to lead to a remapping of the intellectual landscape of the region. Keywords: digitisation; manuscripts; writing traditions; Islamic […]
May 19, 2020
Book Review: Richard Fox, More than Words. Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali.
Richard Fox, More than Words. Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018, 264 p. ISBN 9781501725357. Writing and letters in Bali are not just ways to transmit, preserve and disseminate ideas and simple or complex messages and literature. In Bali, writing goes far beyond these more or less ‘universal’ simple reasons why people resort to putting things on paper, or nowadays in the mobile telephone or computer. Letters and writing assume more ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ roles in Bali which not only linger on but assume new and vibrant new roles on the […]
March 25, 2020
At present, the world is facing a global pandemic due to the spread of the Coronavirus (Covid-19). Herewith we express our deep concern and hope that this situation will end soon. For the time being, for safety reasons, we have decided to stop sending out missions for the preservation and digitization of manuscripts throughout the Southeast Asian region. This policy shall come into force on 26 March 2020 and will last until normal conditions have returned. Nevertheless, we keep access open to our collections that have already been put online. At present, 20,129 images with a high-quality resolution of 593 […]
March 13, 2020
Dr Dick van der Meij, DREAMSEA’s Academic Advisor and Liaison Officer was invited to deliver a lecture during the International Symposium on Royal Attire and Civilization at the Royal Ambarrukmo Hotel in Yogyakarta from 9-10 March 2020. He delivered his lecture entitled “Illustrated Manuscripts from Yogyakarta and the Attire the Figures on the Illustrations Wear” on 9 March. He presented some of the results and the questions that came up during his philological investigation of the figures and their attire as found in illustrations in a number of manuscripts from Central Java preserved in collections in Berlin and Leiden. At […]
February 11, 2020
Jakarta, DREAMSEA – At present, digitised pages of manuscripts from a variety of Southeast Asian cultures have been made available online. The public can read these digital manuscripts on the Open Access website https://dreamsea.co after clicking on REPOSITORY menu. The digitised manuscripts and the Open Access website have been made available by the program Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia (DREAMSEA). In this first stage, high resolution images of 593 manuscripts containing 20,129 pages have been made available along with the metadata. They originate from three different collections. The first part is the legacy of the […]
February 6, 2020
Many libraries in the world preserve Javanese pawukonmanuscripts containing divinatory calendars based on the Javanese 30 seven-day wukucycle. Collections are found in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta, the University of Indonesia in Depok, the royal palaces of Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Central Java, the Museum Sonobudoyo in Yogyakarta, Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, the British Library in London and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin in Germany, to name some of them. A number of pawukonmanuscripts are illustrated and form the topic of this contribution. Read More
February 6, 2020
Manuscripts are not only about content. The leather bindings, the kinds of paper, and the ink used may tell us stories without words – material talks. Dr. Dick van der Meij will introduce us to some Javanese manuscripts In 2015, the Leiden University Libraries received a very special gift from Prof. Merle Ricklefs, who donated seven Javanese manuscripts to the library (Cod.Or. 27.087 – 27.093). Prior to this donation he had already donated the extraordinary Serat Pustakaraja (D Or. 661) to the KITLV library, now part of the UB Leiden. These eight manuscripts form a most magnificent collection on Javanese […]
February 6, 2020
I Today’s guest blog, highlighting one of the most important Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakartawhich has just been digitised, is by Dr Dick van der Meij from Hamburg University’s DREAMSEAproject which digitises endangered manuscripts in Southeast Asia. Javanese texts are generally written in a non-rhyming poetic form called tembang macapat. Within each metre, verses consist of stanzas with a fixed number of lines, a fixed number of syllables per line, and a fixed vowel in the last syllable of each line. There are about 30 different metres, some of which are short and have only four lines per stanza, while others […]