Sarah Bowen Savant and Mathew Barber

Sarah Bowen Savant is the Principle Investigator of the KITAB project. She is preparing a book entitled A Cultural History of the Arabic Book that explores the many ways that writers reused earlier texts to create new ones in the period spanning from 700-1500 CE. She is also working on a book project with Masoumeh Seydi treating Digital Humanities for Arabic-script languages.

Mathew is a historian working with the KITAB team to develop and improve their visualisations and applications. He specialises in Fatimid historiography (c. tenth-twelfth centuries), its later survival and broader history-writing practices in Egypt.

Modeling Attribution and Acknowledgement in the Digital Humanities: Citation Practices and the Pre-Modern Arabic Book.

A two-day workshop, 25th - 26th July 2022
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London

For some time, the KITAB team has been dealing with the practice of citation in the pre-modern Arabic written tradition. In doing so, we are building on extensive work in Arabic and Islamic studies that deals with how authors cite, and particularly their use of isnads (that is, chains of transmission). Digital Humanities, moreover, offers us new and exciting methods for the identification and analysis of citations within our texts.

Through this informal workshop, we hope to present some of our research and also to hear from other researchers who are working on citation (case studies from both Arabic and non-Arabic contexts are very much welcomed). If you are working on any of the topics below, we invite you to present a proposal for a 20-minute paper:

  • Digital methods used to identify and interpret citations within large textual traditions.

  • Digital methods used to parse citations (particularly isnads) and convert them into transmission networks.

  • Terminology: What do authors mean when they use certain transmission terms? How does the use of these terms differ diachronically and spatially?

  • Correspondences between text reuse and citation: can we trace cited text within a corpus? Can we identify instances of uncited text?

  • Theories of citation: what constitutes plagiarism? What forms are citation expected to take? How does written citation intersect with oral practices?

The workshop will take place in two halves. In the first half, participants will be invited to give a paper to a panel with a respondent. To facilitate broader engagement, the paper sessions will be broadcast via zoom. In the second half, there will be an informal (and we hope lively) conversation about citation practices. This will take place in person with the number of offline participants kept low to enable a lively and productive conversation.

If you would like to participate, please submit an abstract of less than 300 words to kitab@aku.edu by 13th May 2022.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and hearing from others who are as excited about citation as we are!

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