Blog

At the Arabic Pasts conference this year, Hugh Kennedy and I presented a paper in the panel dedicated to the Invisible East program, chaired by the program’s PI Arezou Azad. The paper focused on a fragment from an as-yet-unknown Arabic historical text, focused on the...

(This is the first blog post in a longer series of posts about the sources of OpenITI) Al-Maktaba al-Shāmila (“The comprehensive library”, often referred to simply as Shamela) is a free software that aims at providing a digital research environment for Islamic...

The British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) and De Gruyter have announced the outcome of the fifth (2020) round of the BRAIS – De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World. The winning submission is Gowaart Van Den Bossche's PhD thesis, which he...

A new version (version 2020.2.3) of the OpenITI corpus is available at Zenodo, an Open Science platform that supports Open Access. This is the third release (second release in 2020) developed by the OpenITI organization. It is also accessible at GitHub. The current...

Sarah Savant and Masoumeh Seydi, as co-authors One of the major challenges for those working with historical Arabic texts is the names, and the variety of ways that authors might refer to the same person. An author might, for example, refer to someone as ‘Hisham’, or...

As digital historians and corpus curators, faced with the complex history of reception and transmission as well as the distinct approach to learning and authorship, attributing authors to premodern Islamicate texts and representing this complexity within our corpus...

This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on history writing in Arabic. This year the event will be held online to allow compliance with current UK social distancing guidelines. We hope to welcome newcomers to the...

Text reuse is the term that we use to describe cases where one book shares verbatim material with another. Text reuse can be studied manually through the reading of texts in parallel, but it can also be detected computationally, using the passim algorithm....

To categorise things is a fundamental human and scholarly instinct and activity. And yet it is one not without obstacles, for we soon learn that the world is more complex than we originally thought or that we are confronted with something which refuses to conform to...