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.

Using the many to spot the few

by Lorenz Nigst | Jul 13, 2021

At present, the OpenITI / KITAB corpus comprises 10,243 text files, 6,268 of which are unique titles. Such a large, and growing, number of texts makes quality control challenging. But at the same time, it is precisely this large number of texts that can be the basis...

A Token Frequency Counter For OpenITI Texts

by Peter Verkinderen | Jul 13, 2021

One of the participants in our KITAB user group asked for an easy way to find out which are the most frequently used words in a text. There are quite a lot of online tools that allow you to upload a file (or provide a link to a web page) and will produce a nice table...

From Networks to Named Entities and Back Again: Exploring Isnad Networks

by Ryan Muther | May 31, 2021

I have previously written for the project about detecting isnads, Arabic citations which give a chain of individuals involved in the transmission of information rather than the single source common in other forms of citation, in the OpenITI corpus using machine...

First Five Hundred Years of the Arabic Book: The Native Origin of the Authors

by Aslisho Qurboniev | Apr 29, 2021

Quantitative and Macro-analytic Approaches What do we know about the authors of the earliest Arabic books in terms of their native origins and linguistic and cultural backgrounds? Were the majority of them Arabic-speaking Muslims from imperial capitals, or non-Arab...

Can Digital Humanities be informed by bioinformatics? Visualising passim data for multiple-book relationships

by Mathew Barber | Apr 29, 2021

Can Digital Humanities be informed by bioinformatics? Visualising passim data for multiple-book relationships As KITAB’s research has shown, passim is an incredibly powerful tool for answering a variety of questions about book history and history in general. The...

Call for Papers – Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies (Annual Workshop)

by Anjum Alam | Mar 30, 2021

This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on history writing in Arabic. We encourage contributions focused on methodologies, research agendas, and case studies that investigate history writing in the Middle East and North Africa...

OpenITI release 2021.1.4

by Masoumeh Seydi | Feb 12, 2021

The KITAB team has released a new version (2021.1.4) of the OpenITI corpus at Zenodo. The release is open access and freely available. It is our fourth release (first release in 2021) You can also access the release through our GitHub repository. The release features...

Diversifying the OpenITI corpus, One Text at a Time

by Gowaart Van Den Bossche | Jan 21, 2021

The vast majority of texts in the OpenITI corpus were sourced from three major collections of digital texts originally prepared by organisations based in the Middle East (see Peter Verkinderen’s excellent blog on the largest of them, Shamela). These collections have...

Tracing the origins of a historical fragment focused on the Sāmānids

by Thomas Benfey | Dec 11, 2020

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...

Al-Maktaba al-Shāmila: a short history

by Peter Verkinderen | Dec 3, 2020

(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...

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