First Five Hundred Years of the Arabic Book: The Native Origin of the Authors
Quantitative and macroanalytic approaches
Text reuse and citation data can be particularly valuable for identifying ‘lost’ texts, which may have survived dispersed across the various texts in our corpus. To use a famous example, Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet has not survived, but our text reuse data helps illustrate how his biography was used and shared by a large number of later authors.
A number of our blog posts address questions regarding lost and dispersed texts:
Between Manuscripts and Digital Texts: Commentaries on Hadith Raʾs al-Jalut
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...
Adventures in Alignments: Training an Algorithm to Recognise Text Reuse
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...
Algorithmic Reading of Shiʿi Hadith Collections: Direct Borrowing and Common Sources
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...
On Commentaries, Digressions, Transtextualities, and Rabbit Holes
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...