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.

Contagion in the Corpus: The Black Death and Where to Find It

by Gowaart Van Den Bossche | Apr 22, 2020

“How can I bear to pair fair words in rhyme when I have lost the one with whom I was a pair?” So mourns the great Mamluk-era poet Ibn Nubatah al-Misri (d. 768/1366) for his deceased concubine. She was but one of the many family members the poet lost...

The New OpenITI Metadata Search

by Peter Verkinderen | Mar 6, 2020

The OpenITI corpus was designed in a way that makes it easy for scripts to access, identify and analyze the texts in the corpus. As a human reader, it was until now not easy to find a particular text you are interested in: all texts have a filename that...

Tracking Traditions: Identifying Isnads in the OpenITI Corpus

by Ryan Muther | Feb 3, 2020

Due to its size and coverage, the OpenITI corpus is useful for a wide variety of research purposes. Particularly, it represents an excellent opportunity to apply computational methods from natural language processing and machine learning to solve problems...

When al-Tabarī is Not (Just) al-Tabarī: The Challenges Posed by Composite Editions in the OpenITI Corpus

by Mathew Barber | Jan 10, 2020

In the past few months the KITAB team have been closely studying the issue of versioning and composite editions in the OpenITI corpus. The problem of versioning is as follows: For many of the texts in the corpus we possess multiple versions, often based on...

On Commentaries, Digressions, Transtextualities, and Rabbit Holes

by Gowaart Van Den Bossche | Dec 3, 2019

Running passim on the OpenITI corpus allows us to identify a vast number of instances of text reuse, but the quality of these results from a historical point of view depends on the quality of texts in the corpus. As the material was pulled from various...

Judging the Differences between Arabic Text Versions Mathematically

by Sarah Savant | Nov 14, 2019

Researchers working on historical Arabic texts have long known about transmission practices that resulted in considerable differences between ostensibly the same works. Scholars transmitted to many students and sometimes over long time spans; works were transmitted...

A New Application that Helps You Find Texts in the OpenITI Corpus

by Sarah Savant | Nov 4, 2019

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) is a multi-institutional effort to construct the first open-access machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. The co-PIs for the project are Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna), Sarah Bowen Savant...

First Open Access Release of Our Arabic Corpus

by Sarah Savant | Jun 8, 2019

Scholars working in Arabic can now download the entire corpus used by the KITAB team through Zenodo, an Open Science platform that supports Open Access. Users will find in the corpus here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3082464 Number of authors: 1,859....

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...