Posts by year

2023

OpenITI release 2023.1.8

1 minute read

The 8th version (2023.1.8) of the OpenITI corpus is now available at Zenodo. The release is open access and is also accessible through our GitHub repository....

Post 8: Bibliography

4 minute read

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...

Post 7: People, Connections and Memory

13 minute read

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...

Arabic Pasts 2023: Programme

less than 1 minute read

We are pleased to announce the programme for this year’s Arabic Pasts, running from Thursday 5th until Friday 6th of October 2023. We have yet another exciti...

OpenITI release 2022.2.7

2 minute read

The KITAB team has released a new version (2022.2.7) of the OpenITI corpus at Zenodo. The release is open access. It is our seventh release (second release i...

2022

OpenITI release 2022.1.6

1 minute read

The KITAB team has released a new version (2022.1.6) of the OpenITI corpus at Zenodo. The release is open access. It is our fifth release (second release in ...

OpenITI and the Fihrist: Analysis

18 minute read

This is the third blog in a short series of blogs on the overlap between the OpenITI corpus and Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist. Please refer to the first part for a ...

OpenITI and the Fihrist: Methodology

14 minute read

This is the second blog in a short series of blogs on the overlap between the OpenITI corpus and Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist. Please refer to the first part for a...

OpenITI and the Fihrist

3 minute read

The corpus of texts the KITAB project uses as the basis for its research is a subsection of the OpenITI corpus. It contains Arabic-language texts of the firs...

Arabic Pasts 2022: Programme

less than 1 minute read

We are pleased to announce the programme for this year’s Arabic Pasts. We have yet another exciting series of papers covering a range of topics and periods. ...

2021

New KITAB visualizations

15 minute read

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...

OpenITI release 2021.2.5

1 minute read

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 ...

Using the Many to Spot the Few

3 minute read

At present, the OpenITI/KITAB corpus comprises 10,243 text files, 6,268 of which are unique titles.

OpenITI release 2021.1.4

1 minute read

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...

2020

OpenITI release 2020.2.3

1 minute read

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 ...

Mapping Who’s Who in Isnads – First Steps

10 minute read

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...

Preserving Pre-Modern Terminologies

11 minute read

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...

OpenITI, OCR, and Textual Criticism

5 minute read

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 ...

The New OpenITI Metadata Search

2 minute read

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...

2019

2018

Arabic Pasts – 2018

less than 1 minute read

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...

A First Look at KITAB’s Data

4 minute read

The digital revolution is arriving rather late to Middle Eastern studies, but it is coming fast.

2017