Post 1: Introducing Ibn ‘Asakir and His History of Damascus
The OpenITI corpus contains more than 11,000 works and now exceeds 2 billion words in size. Many of the corpus’s works are extraordinarily large, surpassing ...
Dispatches from Ibn 'Asakir
Post 2: Ibn ‘Asakir and His History of Damascus, the Data Set
Digital humanists often say they would like to read more work in progress. Our blog posts represent such work. We worked intensively over months to create an...
Post 3: Ibn ‘Asakir’s Direct Informants
Ibn ʿAsākir names many persons from whom he acquired information for the TMD. What can our data tell us about them?
Post 4: Ibn ‘Asakir’s Transmission Terms in Isnads
Our previous blog post featured a deep dive into the pool of informants whom Ibn ʿAsākir cites frequently. Now we turn to the big picture of how he says he a...
Post 5: Ibn ‘Asakir’s Citation of Author Names in Isnads
We continue our investigation of Ibn ʿAsākir’s citations to address our third question about his working methods. When author names appear within his isnāds,...
Post 6: Searches for References to written materials outside of Isnads
As noted in the last post, we struggled to verify book citations in the TMD, both within and outside of isnāds. We believe that our struggles reflect the cha...
Post 7: People, Connections and Memory
Image yourself as a learned bookseller of the twelfth century. You have just been called in to assess the estate of a wealthy, prominent scholar who has died...
Post 8: Bibliography
Antrim, Zayde, ‘Nostalgia for the Future: A Comparison between the Introductions to Ibn ʿAsākir’s Taʾrīkh Madīnat Dimashq and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Taʾrīkh...