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.
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... read more
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.
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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).
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