Maxim Romanov

Maxim Romanov

Maxim Romanov’s research focuses on the social history of the premodern Islamic world, the history of the Arabic written tradition, and computational methods and approaches relevant for Islamicate studies. Until recently, he held a joint position as a senior research fellow at the KITAB Project (AKU-ISMC, London) and as a Universitätsassistent of Digital Humanities (University of Vienna). Currently, at the University of Hamburg, he is leading a research project titled “The Evolution of Islamic Societies (c.600-1600 CE): Algorithmic Analysis into Social History”, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the Emmy Noether Program.

Recent posts

Islamic World, 661-1300 CE

2 minute read :: Posted on January 21, 2013

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...

Python Functions for Arabic

1 minute read :: Posted on January 2, 2013

There are certain operations one has to repeat many times while manipulating Arabic text. For a number of purposes Arabic text must be normalized, namely “noise” characters deleted, the orthography of problematic letters unified, etc. Sometimes it is necessary to deNormalize search words, i.e. modify regular express... more...