Learning classical Arabic is a long process. (One of my University of Michigan professors once joked that it is hard only for the first ten years—after that it gets worse.) Most of us took great pleasure in advanced reading classes with our professors. Yet, often struggling with the overwhelming volume of new vocabu... more...
While looking for a way to identify all biographical collections and chronicles (and, by extension, all other texts that offer data for time-series analysis) in a collection of 0ver 10,000 texts, it occurred to me that all these texts share the same common feature—they are teeming with dates. So, what if we try t... more...
TEI XML has long become the standard for tagging humanistic texts for research purposes. It is the standard in most digital libraries (including the Perseus Digital Library). Having texts in a TEI XML format that conforms to the standards of a long-standing library allows one to take advantage of libraries’ infrastr... more...
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.” [View the story on Storify] more...
“Envy is not a very good thing. Yet envy is precisely what an early Islamicist feels when he reads Roger Bagnall and Bruce Frier’s The Demography of Roman Egypt.” 1 These words stuck in my head since the very moment I read them and over the past two years of working among and with the classicists my classics envy ha... more...