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.
Algorithmic Reading of Shiʿi Hadith Collections: Direct Borrowing and Common Sources
by Aslisho Qurboniev | Jun 22, 2020
It is not accidental that a large number of books in the OpenITI corpus belong to one important genre, the Prophetic hadith – the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and accounts of his practice. As a repository of the Prophetic tradition (sunna), they are considered as...
read moreNew Release of Our Open Access Arabic Corpus, OpenITI, version 2020.1.2
by Masoumeh Seydi | Jun 17, 2020
A new version of the corpus used by the KITAB team is now available to download at Zenodo, an Open Science platform that supports Open Access. This is the second release developed by the OpenITI organization. It is also accessible at GitHub. The current...
read moreTagging the Structure of Texts in the OPENITI Corpus
by Hamid Reza Hakimi | Jun 12, 2020
With currently more than 7,000 titles, collected from a number of huge digital Arabic libraries (al-Jami al-Kabir, al-Maktaba al-Shamila, Shia Online Library, etc.), the OPENITI corpus is recognised as one of the most comprehensive Arabic corpora online....
read moreContagion 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...
read moreThe 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...
read moreTracking 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...
read moreWhen 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...
read moreOn 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...
read moreJudging 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...
read moreA 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...
read moreFirst 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....
read moreArabic 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...
read moreArabic 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...
read moreA 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...
read moreWe 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...
read moreKITAB 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...
read moreDetecting 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...
read moreHappy 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.
read moreA 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).
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