The work of KITAB relies heavily on collaboration, especially multidisciplinary collaboration. We believe that this should be at the core of all Digital Humanities projects. Many of our collaborators do not work in Arabic or in history, but it is our goal to ensure that such collaborative work can benefit all those involved.
Some examples of the kinds of collaborative work that we do are the following:
- engaging with subject specialists to grow the corpus and make it more representative
- helping researchers analysing texts to annotate their texts with OpenITI mARkdown, allowing both sides to benefit from future analysis of OpenITI texts
- drawing on researchers’ expertise to identify issues with texts in the corpus (such as missing parts or incorrect metadata); see also our guidance on submitting issues
- working with computer scientists and computational linguists to develop and refine machine-learning-based approaches for classical Arabic (for more, see the current challenges in working with classical Arabic).
All of our collaborations are founded on the principle of data sharing. For example, if you share texts or help expand the corpus, we will share our text reuse data in return.
Do you think you could help KITAB’s work? We are excited to hear from you.