In the course of the first millennium of its history (c. 600–1600 CE), Islamic society evolved from a simple tribal polity into a multifaceted social, cultural, and political entity that stretched from Spain and North Africa in the West to Central Asia and India in the East. Arabic chronicles and biographical collec... more...
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Although it is not as large as such associations as AAR and AHA, it is very dear to most of us who are engaged in the study of Middle East. Those who attended the annual meeting in Boston must have seen an attempt to visualize acad... more...
Defining digital humanities is tricky. Our scholarship has been intrinsically digital for quite a few decades already, as we rely more and more on electronic storage to save, word processors to write, bibliography managers to organize, databases to consult, digital libraries to search and read. Living in the digital... more...
Biographical and bibliographical texts can offer a valuable insight into the process of cultural production in the Islamic world. One of the most relevant texts is the Hadiyyaŧ al-ʿārifīn (“The Gift to the Knowledgeable”)—a bio-bibliographical collection written by Ismāʿīl Bāšā al-Baġdādī (d. 1338/1919 CE). Although... more...
The OpenITI team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University’s (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven... more...