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.

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...

Happy News from the ERC…..and Some Details

by Sarah Savant | Jan 16, 2018

The ERC has awarded KITAB a major grant that supports our research. I provide some key details. We will be recruiting participants to the project — including a Technical Lead, Research Associate, Post-docs, and researchers to support our annotation of the corpus.

A Tale of 3 “Versions”

by Sarah Savant | Sep 10, 2017

In this first blog I begin with a discussion of what our methods might be able to show us about the early transmission of the written tradition. The case I take up involves the Muwaṭṭaʾ (“the well-trodden path”) of Imam Mālik b. Anas (d. 796), which is also a founding book for Islamic law and Prophetic tradition (Hadith).