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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...

Sarah Savant and Masoumeh Seydi, as co-authors One of the major challenges for those working with historical Arabic texts is the names, and the variety of ways that authors might refer to the same person. An author might, for example, refer to someone as ‘Hisham’, or...

As digital historians and corpus curators, faced with the complex history of reception and transmission as well as the distinct approach to learning and authorship, attributing authors to premodern Islamicate texts and representing this complexity within our corpus...

This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on history writing in Arabic. This year the event will be held online to allow compliance with current UK social distancing guidelines. We hope to welcome newcomers to the...

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...