OpenITI release 2021.2.5
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
At present, the OpenITI/KITAB corpus comprises 10,243 text files, 6,268 of which are unique titles.
First Five Hundred Years of the Arabic Book: The Native Origin of the Authors
Quantitative and macroanalytic approaches
OpenITI release 2021.1.4
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...
Diversifying the OpenITI corpus, One Text at a Time
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...
Tracing the origins of a historical fragment focused on the Samanids
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...
Al-Maktaba al-Shamila: a short history
(This is the first blog post in a longer series of posts about the sources of OpenITI.)
OpenITI release 2020.2.3
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 ...
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...
Preserving Pre-Modern Terminologies
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
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 ...
New Release of Our Open Access Arabic Corpus, OpenITI, version 2020.1.2
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...
Tagging the Structure of Texts in the OPENITI Corpus
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.)...
Contagion in the Corpus: The Black Death and Where to Find It
“How can I bear to pair fair words in rhyme
When al-Tabari is Not (Just) al-Tabari: The Challenges Posed by Composite Editions in the OpenITI Corpus
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...
First Open Access Release of Our Arabic Corpus
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.