@article{shams-etal-2026-scripting,
    title = "Scripting History: A Diachronic {U}rdu Text and Image Corpus from the 18{T}h to 19{T}h Centuries",
    author = "Shams, Sana  and
      Rauf, Sahar  and
      Mustafa, Asad  and
      Javed, Muhammad Zeeshan  and
      Akram, Qurat-ul-Ain  and
      Hussain, Sarmad  and
      Butt, Miriam",
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.127/",
    pages = "1622--1632",
    abstract = "This paper presents the Diachronic Urdu Text and Image Corpus, a one-million-word resource covering Urdu{'}s development across the 18th and 19th centuries. The corpus is compiled from 328 printed books published between 1800 and 1950, representing a diverse range of genres, authors, and publishers. A 140,000-word sub-corpus has been manually annotated with Urdu part-of-speech tags to facilitate linguistic and computational analysis. The dataset enables systematic investigation of historical changes in Urdu orthography, morphology, and syntax, providing new insights into the language{'}s history and standardization. To preserve the original printed form, each text is paired with its corresponding page image, creating the first multimodal diachronic corpus for Urdu. The paper outlines the corpus compilation pipeline, digitization workflow, text-image alignment, and annotation strategy designed to ensure accuracy, consistency, and authenticity. This multimodal Urdu diachronic corpus establishes a benchmark for research in computational linguistics, digital humanities, and South Asian language technology, supporting corpus-based exploration of Urdu{'}s linguistic history and cultural heritage."
}