On October 16, 2015, the Digital Islamic Humanities Program at Brown University held its third annual scholarly gathering, a symposium on the subject “Distant Reading & the Islamic Archive.”

Paper abstracts are available here, and some photos of the event are posted below. The symposium was recorded in its entirety and may be accessed at the links following the photo gallery.

Photographs (by Rythum Vinoben; see his website for more photos)

Recordings: 

Session 1:

• Elias Muhanna (Brown University), Introduction and welcoming remarks
• David Vishanoff (University of Oklahoma): A Customizable Exaptive “Xap” for Charting Currents of Islamic Discourse across Multiple Bibliographic and Full Text Datasets
• Peter Verkinderen (Universität Hamburg): Which Muḥammad? Computer-Based Tools for the Identification of Moving Elites in the Early Islamic Empire

Session 2

• Alexander Magidow (Univ. of Rhode Island) & Yonatan Belinkov (MIT), “Digital Philology and the History of Written Arabic”
• Elias Muhanna (Brown University), “Modeling Mannerism in Classical Arabic Poetry”

Session 3 

• Karen Pinto (Boise State University), “MIME and Other Digital Experimentations with Medieval Islamic Maps”
• Seyed Mohammad Bagher Sajadi (Qazvin Islamic Azad University) and Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli (Columbia University): Automatic Proper Names Extraction from Old Islamic Literature
• Maxim Romanov, (Universität Leipzig), “al-Ḏahabī’s Monster: Dissecting a 50-Volume Arabic Chronicle-cum-Biographical Collection From the 14th Century CE”

Session 4

• Nir Shafir (UCLA), “Distant Reading the Material and Bibliographic Record of the Early Modern Islamic Archive”
• Eric van Lit (Yale Univ.), “A Digital Approach for Production and Transmission of Knowledge in Islamic Intellectual History”
• Taimoor Shahid (Univ. of Chicago), “Mobile Ethics: Travel and Cosmopolitanism in the Islamic Archive”