Among many other things, the steadily growing OpenITI corpus of machine-actionable texts constitutes a useful tool for identifying hitherto unidentified text...
Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies\
Citation: please use the citation information (available to export in various formats) on the publication page.
Would you like to help build and diversify the OpenITI corpus? Frustrated that you cannot find your text? Do you wish that OpenITI had more consistent metada...
On 2 January, we began a new European Research Council-funded project, ‘KITAB-Transform’ (ERC, grant no. 101199672). We hope that scholars will join us on wh...
Back-end support engineer (subcontractor) - ERC Project KITAB Transform
Bias in the OpenITI corpus
Digital Lead (Subcontractor) – ERC Project KITAB-Transform
The Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC), in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, hosted a two-day...
In manuscripts dedicated to dreams and divination, one occasionally finds a short narrative involving Muḥammad Khawārazmshāh. It claims that he summoned spec...
This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on methodologies, case studies, and research agendas for investigating histor...
Workshop: From Classical ML to AI in Arabic and Islamic Studies: A Hands-On Workshop, July 1-4, 2025
Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies
Some might know the 1945 Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman song Till the End of Time, made famous by Perry Como. The beginning of the lyrics run like this:
Over the past few years, I have become quite interested in historical Druze religious poetry (from about the 17th–18th century CE onwards). Stumbling across ...
Please join us for an online ‘Open House’ convened by the Centre for Digital Humanities at the Aga Khan University (International) in the United Kingdom and ...
We released a data set of an experiment conducted by Sarah Bowen Savant and Sohail Merchant, who wanted to understand potentially how, and from what, Shihāb ...
We are pleased to announce the programme for this year’s Arabic Pasts workshop, running from Thursday 3rd until Friday 4th of October 2024. We have yet anoth...
A new version of KITAB’s text reuse data is now available to download at Zenodo, an Open Science platform that supports Open Access. The current release feat...
Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies
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....
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
Ibn ʿAsākir names many persons from whom he acquired information for the TMD. What can our data tell us about them?
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...
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 ...
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...
Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
On Tuesday September 27, 2022 at 12:00-1:00PM US EST at Lewis 214, KITAB’s Sarah Bowen Savant, will lead a seminar on research in progress that uses the Open...
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. ...
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 projectStudying the Arabic textual tradition...
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