The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) is a multi-institutional effort to construct the first open-access machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. The co-PIs for the project are Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna), Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University-ISMC, London), and Matthew Miller (University of Maryland, College Park). Our corpus is now searchable online, using the following link: https://kitab-project.org/metadata.
The application allows you to search the entire Arabic OpenITI corpus and get access to complete texts via GitHub. Texts may be read in a web browser, but they are designed to be read with EditPad Pro, which can highlight their structural elements. For details, see OpenITI mARkdown.
We are actively reviewing the quality of our machine-readable files thanks to funding from the European Research Council (ERC). The ultimate aim for the project is to ensure that each machine-readable file reflects the underlying print edition upon which it is based (not, for example, to propose better readings of the prior manuscript traditions).
The application will allow you to contribute to our review process by raising issues with the text via GitHub. Thank you in advance for any contribution towards improving the corpus.
How to cite the OpenITI
Our files are based in the first instance on existing open digital libraries, which we acknowledge in our URIs. Please do cite the URIs of specific files if you use them in your research.
Note: Each URI (uniform resource identifier) is a unique and complete file name, such as 0429AbuMansurThacalibi.ThimarQulub.Shamela0006896-ara1, which refers to a version of the text of the Thimar al-qulub of Abu Mansur al-Thaʿalibi (d. 429/1038), based on the text from Shamela with an internal ID of 6896 (https://shamela.ws/index.php/book/6896).
OpenITI releases are freely available to download, in their entirety, from our GitHub repository (https://github.com/OpenITI/RELEASE) and Zenodo.
We hope you will use the OpenITI and it will become a resource for scholars internationally. If you do use it, please cite it, using the following format:
Maxim Romanov and Masoumeh Seydi, OpenITI: A Machine-Readable Corpus of Islamicate Texts (Version 2019.1.1) [data set] (June 2019), Zenodo, http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3082464.