Blog

Welcome to KITAB’s blog! This is the space where we give air to ideas as they arise, share some of what we are finding with our digital methods, and pose and answer questions. The themes will generally be academic and we invite responses that inform and challenge. We view this as an informal and experimental space, where we can all take risks – as is far too rare in typical research. And we take inspiration from many Digital Humanists outside our own field.

On commentaries, digressions, transtextualities and rabbit holes

by Gowaart Vandenbossche | Dec 3, 2019

Running passim on the OpenITI corpus allows us to identify a vast number of instances of text reuse, but the quality of these results from a historical point of view depends on the quality of texts in the corpus. As the material was pulled from various...

Judging the differences between Arabic text versions mathematically

by Sarah Savant | Nov 14, 2019

Researchers working on historical Arabic texts have long known about transmission practices that resulted in considerable differences between ostensibly the same works. Scholars transmitted to many students and sometimes over long time spans; works were transmitted...

A New Application that Helps You Find Texts in the OpenITI Corpus

by Sarah Savant | Nov 4, 2019

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) is a multi-institutional effort to construct the first open-access machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. The co-PIs for the project are Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna), Sarah Bowen Savant...

First Open Access Release of Our Arabic Corpus

by Sarah Savant | Jun 8, 2019

Scholars working in Arabic can now download the entire corpus used by the KITAB team through Zenodo, an Open Science platform that supports Open Access. Users will find in the corpus here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3082464 Number of authors: 1,859....

Arabic Pasts – 2019 call for papers

by Sarah Savant | Mar 15, 2019

Paper abstracts are now welcome for the annual "Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiography" workshop, to be held 18 and 19th of October 2019 at the Aga Khan Centre, London. More...

Arabic Pasts – 2018

by Claire Savina | Nov 8, 2018

The "Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiography" workshop was held in the new Aga Khan Centre in London on the 12th and 13th of October and featured papers treating history writing from the origins of Islam up to the present day. Organized by Hugh Kennedy, James...

A First Look at KITAB’s Data

by Sarah Savant | Sep 7, 2018

The digital revolution is arriving rather late to Middle Eastern Studies, but it is coming fast. Now, we can see the written tradition at a distance with KITAB’s first dataset. Spoiler: it is hugely intertexual. There are important caveats: we need to...

We are hiring

by Editor | Sep 7, 2018

The Aga Khan University-ISMC is seeking three post-doctoral research fellows to work with an international and interdisciplinary group of investigators for the European Research Council-funded project, KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the...

KITAB is welcoming a new member!

by Editor | Sep 2, 2018

KITAB members are happy to welcome Claire Savina, our new Research Associate. Claire is a Comparative Literature and Arabic Studies researcher and is interested in Translation, Circulation and History of Texts, as well as World Literature and...

Detecting What Authors Took from Earlier Works

by Sarah Savant | May 2, 2018

With text reuse detection, we rely on the power, speed, and memory of a computer to find common passages between texts. From our data so far, we can already see hundreds, or even thousands, of cases that point to the liquidity of the written tradition. By “liquid,” I...