A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies
We wish our followers, colleagues and friends a joyful Norouz 1404! As nature awakens with the arrival of spring, may this renewal bring you health, hope and happiness.
Thank you for your continued support and engagement—we truly appreciate it. May the spirit of Norouz inspire a bright and fulfilling year ahead!
نوروز شاد و پیروز!
As we mark a decade of sharing bibliographic updates and scholarly announcements, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to our colleagues, readers and supporters. What began as a small initiative has grown into a platform reaching around 1,200 readers per week. Your engagement, encouragement, and feedback have been invaluable in shaping and sustaining this project. We deeply appreciate your continued interest and look forward to many more years of collaboration, discovery, and shared enthusiasm for Iranian Studies.
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Sometime in 2012, I began experimenting with posting bibliographic announcements on what was then called Twitter. I made several attempts, but Twitter’s character limit prevented me from posting full bibliographic information. Initially, I was hesitant to connect the Twitter account to a website, but Ursula Sims-Williams encouraged me to do so.
I rejoined Twitter in 2013 and made my first announcement on 7 November 2013, which was linked and preserved on my personal website. I continued this until 10 May 2015, as the general response was positive. It was then that I approached Shervin Farridnejad and Yazdan Safaee with the idea of collaborating on a new website to announce new publications related to Iranian Studies.
In everything I do, I prioritise simplicity, but I also wanted an open and collaborative approach. With this in mind, I proposed limiting our work to announcing new publications and events without adding further commentaries. My goal was to ensure that the new site remained active for as long as possible.
Although I write most of the public announcements related to BiblioIranica and manage the website, our achievements are the result of the open and friendly collaboration that the three of us have maintained over the years. The past decade—and the one ahead—owe much to Shervin and Yazdan’s dedication, endurance, and contributions. I could not be more grateful to them.
We had to leave Twitter—now X—after Jetpack discontinued its X plug-in. We are now active on our Bluesky, Facebook, and Mastodon accounts. Each announcement is also posted on our personal social media accounts. However, the most complete and uninterrupted collection remains the website itself.
As we approach a decade, I have slightly revised the website design and will be refining a few details. I am delighted to relaunch BiblioIranica with a beautiful logo, designed by my friend Amir Mahdi Moslehi—a talented calligrapher, font designer, musician, researcher, and, above all, an exceptional human being.
Amir Mahdi Moslehi is an Iranian type designer, calligrapher, and researcher based in Hamburg, Germany. He holds a Post-Master’s degree in Typographic Research from the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (Nancy, France) and is currently pursuing a master’s in Manuscript Culture at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) in Hamburg. Recently, he became a PhD candidate at the CSMC, University of Hamburg.
His Arabic-script typefaces blend research with calligraphy and are distributed by Maryamsoft (Iran) and Rosetta Type Foundry (Czech Republic). His work has received multiple awards, including the Certificate of Typographic Excellence from the New York Type Directors Club and Granshan Type Design Prizes.
Short bio of Amir Mahdi
We wish all readers of BiblioIranica a happy new year. May you experience joy and happiness in 2024. And if you do, consider yourself lucky and privileged!
In 2023, our social media activities entered an age of confusion and darkness when Twitter/X and Jetpack decided that collaboration wasn’t part of their cosmic alignment. As if that was not enough, Jetpack started to charge for the ‘sharing’ feature. The one thing social media are supposed to foster, ended: collaboration. No hard feelings. I expected a social media meltdown, which is why we have always maintained the website as the main source. We anticipate a reduction in traffic to BiblioIranica in 2024, but hope that our readers will subscribe to our e-mail service and visit the site even if we no longer post on Twitter/X. We need your love and support.
Let us look at some statistics for 2023:
This post is by me, Arash. I would like to think that I am speaking on behalf of my friends Shervin and Yazdan, without whose support we would have not made it this far.
برای همه خوانندگان وبگاه بیبلیوگرافیا ایرانیکا، دوستان و همکاران خوبمان سالی سرشار از تندرستی و شادی آرزو میکنیم.
We wish all our readers, colleagues and friends a Happy Nowruz.
We wish all our readers and followers happy holidays and a joyful new year. Enjoy the festive season, stay safe and recharge.
We wish all our readers, colleagues and friends a Happy Nowruz. May year 1400 bring us all health and happiness.
برای همه خوانندگان ، دوستان و همکاران سال نویی خوب، سرشار از تندرستی و شادی آرزو میکنیم.
We are delighted to host another article by Adam Benkato, our long-standing collaborator and friend.
In Some Data on Publications on Sogdian, Adam uses his extensive bibliography of Sogdian philology, containing 624 entries for publications from 1904 to 2020, to show ‘how a field has grown or developed over time’.
He had previously published this article on his own website but has now moved it to Bibliographia Iranica, where we are planning to host a series of publications on bibliographies. Stay tuned for more from Adam and others.
Just some quick numbers to wrap up 2018: We had a total of 41,504 views on our website, up by 8418 views compared to 2017. In 2018, 22,885 people visited Bibliographia Iranica from 142 countries, the USA leading with 11,363 visitors. We have 1,015 visitors from Japan but only 47 from Iran (perhaps the result of anonymisers?). Sajad Amiri, Shervin Farridnejad, Yazdan Safaee and Arash Zeini together published 172 entries, with “amazon” (20) beating 2017’s “friedrich carl andreas” (6) as the most searched term on the blog. “friedrich carl andreas” came second in 2018 with a total of 13 searches!
As always, the above numbers do not account for the views and shares on our Facebook or Twitter accounts. These are just the website statistics.
Furthermore, our posts were followed 3,573 times from Twitter and 3,427 times from Facebook
Thank you for your continued support and interest in Bibliographia Iranica. We wish you all a happy and healthy 2019.
Messages about updated privacy policies have been flooding your mailboxes this month. We do not know whether we need such a message, but felt left out :) So, we decided to add a page with said content to our website. You find it here. Please do get in touch, if you have any questions about our privacy policy, though we do not guarantee that we will be able to answer your question.
Arash Zeini
Bibliographia Iranica started in May 2015. Although I had received positive feedback about my bibliographic posts on my own blog, it was unclear how well a dedicated bibliographic website for Iranian Studies would be received. I am glad to say that the academic as well as the general reception of our collective effort here at Bibliographia Iranica has been very positive and encouraging. And we know that our user base continues to grow. And so, before the new year advances too far and becomes old news, we should review the statistics for the past year.
In 2016, we had 33,417 views on our website. This number does not account for the post views and shares on our Facebook or Twitter accounts. With 1,147 views, the announcement of the Summer school in the Turfanforschung was the most viewed post on the blog. We had 17,576 visitors from 127 countries, the USA leading with 8211 visitors. Sajad Amiri, Shervin Farridnejad, Yazdan Safaee and Arash Zeini together published an impressive 165 announcements, “Avesta” being the most searched term on the blog.
The success of Bibliographia Iranica owes much to the fact that it is a collective effort, and we hope that our user base continues to grow. There will hopefully be new developments in 2017 which I will announce in due course.
I (Arash) am not on Facebook, but you can get in touch with me through my own website.