Blog

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...