Back to al-Ḏahabī’s Taʾrīḫ al-islām. The present dynamic cartogram shows how the prominence of major urban centers was changing over time. The focus is again on “descriptive names” (nisbaŧ) and the “size” of each urban center on the cartogram reflects the number of individuals with “descriptive names” that refer to ... more...
A project in the digital humanities, the dissertation explores methods of computational text analysis. Relying on text-mining techniques to extract meaningful data from unstructured text, the study offers an effective and flexible method for the analysis of Arabic biographical collections, the most valuable source f... more...
The advent of digital humanities has brought the notion of “big data” into the purview of humanistic inquiry. Humanists now have access to huge corpora that open research possibilities that were unthinkable a decade or two ago. However, working with corpora requires a rather different approach that is more character... more...
Prepared in cooperation with Michael Bonner (U of Michigan) In 1997, Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi (http://www.adach.ae) started development of an extremely useful multimedia Encyclopaedia of [Arabic] Poetry (al-Mawsūʿa al-Shiʿriyya). The first edition (published in 1998) was pretty small and included only... more...
Evenly spaced across the entire period of 41–700 AH/661–1300 CE, the following series of four maps (click to enlarge) visualizes the frequencies of top 100 toponyms mentioned in biographies of al-Ḏahabī’s Taʾrīḫ al-islām: almost 13,000 biographies (44,4%); altogether these locations are mentioned in slightly over 25... more...