A Ramble Through the Cluster Data, Part 2: Quantifying and Visualising Clusters.
In part 1, I introduced you to the cluster data set, a second passim data set that is slightly different from the pairwise data set that the KITAB team use i...
In part 1, I introduced you to the cluster data set, a second passim data set that is slightly different from the pairwise data set that the KITAB team use i...
On Thursday 5th of May 2022 Sarah Bowen Savant gave her inaugural lecture as full professor at the AKU-ISMC.
It should be no surprise to any reader of this blog that the KITAB project is primarily interested in studying Arabic text reuse. A large number of posts her...
Modeling Attribution and Acknowledgement in the Digital Humanities: Citation Practices and the Pre-Modern Arabic Book.
Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies
The OpenITI corpus is designed to facilitate many different forms of computational analysis. Within the KITAB project we spend the bulk of our time fine-tuni...
Much of our work at KITAB involves comparing books in order to understand their relationships. Our main tool for this is the passim software, which detects p...
Tagging the structure of the texts in OpenITI corpus is an important step towards the ultimate goal of the KITAB project—Studying the Arabic textual traditio...
In this series of blog posts, we have argued for the imperative to rethink writerly culture in ways that allow for a more meaningful exploration of al-Tabari...
Post 7: Text Reuse Alignments
The KITAB team has released a new version (2021.2.5) of the OpenITI corpus at Zenodo. The release is open access. It is our fifth release (second release in ...
The argument we are advancing in these blog posts is that when al-Tabari (d. 310/923) created his Taʾrikh al-rusul wa-l-muluk, Jamiʿ al-bayan ʿan taʾwil ay a...
In our previous blog post, we argued that al-Tabari (d. 310/923) had to hand an extensive written collection consisting of sets of well-written notes.
In the preceding posts, we showed that al-Tabari (d. 310/923) used the phrases ‘he told me’ and ‘he told us’ (haddathani/haddathana) in the Taʾrikh al-rusul ...
This is the third in a series of blog posts examining al-Tabari’s (d. 310/923) citations in his Taʾrikh al-rusul wa-l-muluk, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-...
You have now entered the weeds.
In a series of eight blog posts, we share some results of experimental work on citations in three works by Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari (d. 310/923). These ar...
Arabic Pasts 2021 is happening from 7th - 9th of October.
At present, the OpenITI/KITAB corpus comprises 10,243 text files, 6,268 of which are unique titles.
One of the participants in our KITAB user group asked for an easy way to find out which are the most frequently used words in a text.
From Networks to Named Entities and Back Again: Exploring Isnad Networks
Quantitative and macroanalytic approaches
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 algo...
This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on history writing in Arabic. We encourage contributions focused on methodolo...
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 relea...
The vast majority of texts in the OpenITI corpus were sourced from three major collections of digital texts originally prepared by organisations based in the...
At the Arabic Pasts conference this year, Hugh Kennedy and I presented a paper in the panel dedicated to the Invisible East programme, chaired by the program...
(This is the first blog post in a longer series of posts about the sources of OpenITI.)
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 ...
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 ...
One of the major challenges for those working with historical Arabic texts lies in names, and in the variety of ways that authors might refer to the same per...
For us as digital historians and corpus curators, faced with the complex history of reception and transmission as well as the distinct approach to learning a...
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 allo...
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 rea...
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...
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 gr...
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 ...
It is not accidental that a large number of books in the OpenITI corpus belong to one important genre, prophetic Hadith – the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad...
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 se...
With currently more than 7,000 titles, collected from a number of huge digital Arabic libraries (al-Jamiʿ al-Kabir, al-Maktaba al-Shamila, Shia Online, etc.)...
“How can I bear to pair fair words in rhyme
The OpenITI corpus was designed in a way that makes it easy for scripts to access, identify and analyse the texts in the corpus. As a human reader, it was un...
Due to its size and coverage, the OpenITI corpus is useful for a wide variety of research purposes. In particular, it represents an excellent opportunity to ...
In the past few months the KITAB team members have been closely studying the issue of versioning and composite editions in the OpenITI corpus. The problem of...
Running the passim algorithm on the OpenITI corpus allows us to identify a vast number of instances of text reuse, but the quality of these results from a hi...
Researchers working on historical Arabic texts have long known about transmission practices that resulted in considerable differences between what were osten...
The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) is a multi-institutional effort to construct the first open-access machine-actionable scholarly corpus of prem...
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.
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 t...
The digital revolution is arriving rather late to Middle Eastern studies, but it is coming fast.
With text reuse detection, we rely on the power, speed and memory of a computer to find common passages between texts.
The European Research Council has awarded KITAB a five-year, €2 million grant that will enable us to make major progress on our research agenda.
Measuring variation in the early tradition