Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Abstract:

The preservation of Armenian cultural heritage has entered a new era through the rapid expansion of digital repositories. This presentation provides a comprehensive guide to the primary digital infrastructures currently available to scholars, students, and the global Armenian diaspora. By examining key institutions such as the National Library of Armenia, the Matenadaran, and DIGILIB, we explore how digital primary sources—ranging from 4th-century classical manuscripts to 19th-century Ottoman social histories—are breaking geographic barriers. The session compares the scale of major repositories, highlights specialized collections like the Houshamadyan and the USC Shoah Foundation, and discusses the "next frontier" of research: the integration of AI and OCR to transform static images into machine-readable, searchable data for the Multimodal Digital Humanities.