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Text reuse is the term that we use to describe cases where one book shares verbatim material with another. Text reuse can be studied manually through the reading of texts in parallel, but it can also be detected computationally, using the passim algorithm....

To categorise things is a fundamental human and scholarly instinct and activity. And yet it is one not without obstacles, for we soon learn that the world is more complex than we originally thought or that we are confronted with something which refuses to conform to...

The KITAB project is seeking researchers who are interested in collaborating to advance their own, distinct research projects. The aim is to build a small group of academics (6-8) who will work with our corpus of 1.5 billion words of pre-modern Arabic...

In previous posts, other members of the KITAB team have talked about building the OpenITI corpus of Arabic and Persian sources. Many members of the team are also working to build better optical character recognition (OCR) systems in the Arabic-script OCR Catalyst...

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...

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...

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....

“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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...