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...
The KITAB project is chiefly engaged in the study of book history. We employ data such as text reuse evidence and patterns in isnads to address questions such as
- How were books written?
- How did writing practices change over time?
- How was the reuse of text valued by contemporaries and what kinds of reuse might have been considered intellectual theft?
We invite you to read our latest blog posts on the subject:
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ...
OpenITI and the Fihrist: Analysis
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
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
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...
A Ramble Through the Cluster Data, Part 2: Quantifying and Visualising Clusters.
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...
A Ramble Through the Cluster Data, Part 1: From Pairs to Clusters.
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...
From Networks to Named Entities and Back Again: Exploring Isnad Networks
From Networks to Named Entities and Back Again: Exploring Isnad Networks
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...
Al-Maktaba al-Shamila: a short history
(This is the first blog post in a longer series of posts about the sources of OpenITI.)
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...
Adventures in Alignments: Training an Algorithm to Recognise Text Reuse
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...
Algorithmic Reading of Shiʿi Hadith Collections: Direct Borrowing and Common Sources
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...
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...
On Commentaries, Digressions, Transtextualities, and Rabbit Holes
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...
Detecting What Authors Took from Earlier Works
With text reuse detection, we rely on the power, speed and memory of a computer to find common passages between texts.
A Tale of 3 “Versions”
Measuring variation in the early tradition