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A Digital Humanities for Premodern Islamic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2018

Maxim Romanov
Maxim Romanov*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; e-mail: maxim.romanov@univie.ac.at
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Extract

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 world, however, does not make us all digital humanists—if these digital entities are taken away, we will have their analog prototypes to fall back on, and beyond a certain level of inconvenience, this will not affect the way most of us do our scholarship. The transition to digital humanities must begin somewhere at the point where our humanistic inquiry starts to rely on the machine as the matter of methodological exigency.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 129 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 Our scholarship has been intrinsically digital for quite a few decades already, as we began to 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. But if these digital entities are lost, we will have their analog prototypes to fall back on, and beyond a certain level of inconvenience, this will not affect the way most of us do our scholarship.

2 We already have methods to make manuscripts searchable (in a limited way) and soon we'll be able to group manuscripts according to handwriting as well as to identify manuscripts written by the same hand. See, for example, Mike Kestemont and Dominique Stutzmann, “Script Identification in Medieval Latin Manuscripts Using Convolutional Neural Networks,” Digital Humanities 2017: Book of Abstracts (Montreal, 10 August 2017), 283–85.

3 Al-Dhahabi, Taʾrikh al-Islam, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salam Tadmuri, 1st ed., 52 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-ʿArabi, 1990–99).

4 See the website of the Computational Stylistic Group, accessed 6 October 2017, https://sites.google.com/site/computationalstylistics/projects/testing-rolling-stylometry; and Eder, Maciej, Rybicki, Jan, and Kestemont, Mike, “Stylometry with R: A Package for Computational Text Analysis,” R Journal 8 (2016): 107–21Google Scholar.

5 See Romanov, Maxim, “Toward Abstract Models for Islamic History,” in The Digital Humanities + Islamic Middle Eastern Studies, ed. Muhanna, Elias (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 117–49Google Scholar; and Romanov, “Algorithmic Analysis of Medieval Arabic Biographical Collections,” Speculum 92/S1 (2017): 1–21.

6 See Maxim Romanov, “Observations of a Medieval Quantitative Historian?,” Der Islam 94 (2017): 462–95.