In 2010, a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute launched the Library of Arabic Literature, a book series that aims to publish key works of pre-modern and classical Arabic literature in bilingual editions, with the Arabic edition and English translation on facing pages. The General Editor of the series is Philip Kennedy, … Continue reading
Latest developments in the digital sphere offered new opportunities and challenges to the humanists. Equipped with new digital methods of text analysis, scholars in various fields of humanities are now trying to make sense of huge corpora of literary and historical texts. Perhaps the most prominent of such attempts is the work of Franco Moretti and his abstract models … Continue reading
I will discuss approaches to the digitization of Islamic books to explore its impact on Islamic and Middle East Studies, drawing on my research about the manuscript-print transition in Muslim societies within the context of technology transfer across Eurasia. The digitization of books is widely accepted, because the digital processing of written language is merely the latest technology … Continue reading
Digitally-enabled spatial analysis can generate hypotheses, substantiate arguments, and communicate findings at a glance. In this paper, I will demonstrate how spatial analysis reveals the topography of readership in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Using WorldMap has allowed me to collate data from many different sources, including court records, probate inventories, and waqfiyyas, into a single map in … Continue reading
Recent developments in digital humanities pose anew the challenge of sources, concepts, and possibilities for doing history differently. Much of the current debates have been focused on the vices and virtues of the quantity of (in addition to the ease of access to) the archives that digitization has made available to historians; on whether methods … Continue reading
How can sonic phenomena best be represented in academic discourse? While the question has long preoccupied music studies, recent developments in technologies of sound recording and dissemination have given rise to new possibilities for the inscription of knowledge through digital sound recordings. With the growing discipline of sound studies, the role of knowing-through-sound has moved … Continue reading
The private manuscript libraries of Yemen comprise one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Arabic manuscripts. Collectively, these 6,000 private libraries possess some 60,000 codices, many of which are unique. But this irreplaceable trove of manuscripts is threatened. In recent years, Yemen’s private libraries have suffered great losses, in part due to extremists who are ideologically opposed to … Continue reading
This presentation will concern an NEH funded project I’m heading to develop a tool called Prosop. Prosop’s first aim is to assemble a database of descriptions of a very large number of historical individuals, of inferior socio-economnic rank to those who feature in most prosopographic projects. The tool is meant to preserve such information in … Continue reading
This paper elaborates the tools used for mapping the density of news reports onto the city of Damascus and its hinterlands, which were developed in the context of my doctoral research titled “To whom belong the streets? Property, propriety, and appropriation: The production of public places and public spaces in late Ottoman Damascus”. The paper … Continue reading
The Analytical Database of Arabic Poetry will represent an important contribution to the emerging field of digital studies in Arabic philology. The database will include comprehensive data on the vocabulary of early Arabic poetry (6th-8th centuries A.D.) in the form of an electronic dictionary. With the help of the analytical tools of the database, each … Continue reading
In recent years growing attention has been paid to the circulation of texts and to various textual practices throughout the Islamic world in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular. Most studies, however, were qualitative in nature. My paper seeks to demonstrate the advantages of digital humanities for the study of circulation of manuscripts and the ways in … Continue reading
This paper will present the conclusions of an interdisciplinary seminar focused on a Seljuq qu’ran from Hamadan, Iran. The manuscript, shelfmark N.E.-P. 27, is dated to 1164 CE by a colophon, and is now held by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. Students with backgrounds in Near Eastern Languages and Culture and Art History collaborated to investigate … Continue reading
Digital Islamic Humanities Project 