CSMC Launches ACP 4.0Understanding Reading Practices

13 June 2025

Photo: CSMC

Much of what we know today about everyday reading practices in Arabic writing cultures comes from so-called audition certificates. The CSMC has made these valuable documents accessible to researchers for the first time on an online platform. A new version now offers open access to over 5,000 sources.

Who read the texts of the written artefacts we are studying today? Were they even read at all? If so, where and when? In short, how can we trace the moments when these written artefacts were in use?

One answer lies in the notes left by manuscript users, so called paracontent. One of the many projects at the CSMC investigating this phenomenon is ‘Reading the Scholarly Archive in the Pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East’ (RFE14). More specifically, it examines a prominent feature of Arabic written cultures, where manuscript users often added notes that captured the live moments of reading. They recorded when, where and by whom a text was read aloud, often in cities such as Damascus or Cairo, as well as the names of the participants and other circumstances of the reading sessions. As material evidence of reading practices, these so-called ‘audition certificates’ illuminate how a written artefact was employed throughout its life cycle.

Contrary to the assumption that, before print, reading was the preserve of an elite, audition certificates reveal remarkable inclusivity: men and women, children and adults, military commanders and enslaved individuals, wealthy silk merchants and humble blacksmiths – all from Arab, Persian, Ethiopian, Caucasian, and Central Asian backgrounds – participated in the readings. These diverse reading groups gathered in a variety of places: mosques and madrasas, as well as gardens, markets, riverbanks, and battlefields.

To provide access to these unique resources, the CSMC launched the Audition Certificates Platform (ACP) in 2023. It is the first website to make this data available for research. The newly released Version 4.0 includes over 5,100 certificates and the names of almost 65,000 participants of reading sessions, as well as hundreds of different locations where the sessions were conducted. Fully open-access (CC BY 4.0), this platform is now widely used and cited in academic publications. The data is fully versioned, and, in line with CSMC’s commitment to the FAIR principles, has been uploaded to the University of Hamburg’s Research Data Repository with version-specific DOIs.

Usage statistics indicate that this model of publishing data reaches audiences well beyond Europe. The top ten countries from which the data is accessed include Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and Bahrain. ACP benefits from citizen science, with individuals now sending us certificates they have found in manuscripts. Additionally, ACP benefits from other research projects, which make their data accessible on ACP.

ACP’s rich data resulted in numerous CSMC publications, including on documentary practices. It also yielded cross-disciplinary publications involving the CSMC’s Data Linking Lab, such as building sustainable information systems and transformer models on demand. The Data Linking Lab developed the ACP CSMC Creator, a viewer that facilitates easy access and visualisation to share and preserve data in a self-contained and user-friendly manner. ACP is now looking forward to working with the Centre’s Visual Manuscript Analysis Lab to develop AI tools for the automated transcription of the certificates’ texts, without losing their spatial context within the book.