Crusaders versus Gunpowder, and Future-Proofing (original) (raw)
The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies
2016
The editor would liketothank the following individuals and institutions for their support of this volume. The Humanities Researcha nd Teaching Fund at Brown Universitys ponsored the 2013 conferencea tw hich manyo ft hese essays were first read, and Dean Kevin McLaughlin and AssociateD ean Anne Windham have continued to support the research initiative that has grown out of it.I am especiallyg rateful to BesharaD oumani, who has been ac rucial advocate of this project from the outset,and to Barbara Oberkoetter,who has contributed essentiall ogistical support and grace under pressure. Elli Mylonas and Maxim Romanovf reelyl ent their expertise and advice, and Tony Watson introduced me to Alissa Jones Nelson, our editor at De Gruyter,w ho has shepherded this project along with care and professionalism.
Off the Record: On Studying Lost Arabic Books and their Networks
Medieval Worlds 18, pp. 219 - 245, 2023
In this paper we discuss the notion of Arabic literary works which, to the best of our knowledge, have been lost over the course of history. We examine factors contributing to the likelihood of transmission, address current interdisciplinary debates, and discuss digital tools applied to estimating the loss of literary heritage or to retrieving information on lost works. Our aim is to highlight the potential that bio-bibliographical works hold for the study of lost texts and manuscripts.
Distant Reading & the Islamic Archive (Symposium Abstracts)
Each year, the number of digitized books, inscriptions, images, documents, and other artifacts from the Islamic world continues to grow. As this archive expands, so too does the repertoire of digital tools for navigating and interpreting its diffuse and varied contents. Drawing upon such tools as topic modeling, context-based search, social network maps, and text reuse algorithms, the study of large-scale archives and textual corpora is undergoing significant and exciting developments. The Middle East Studies program at Brown University is pleased to announce the third annual gathering of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project, to be held at the Joukowsky Forum on Friday, October 16, 2015.
IPM Monthly: Medieval Philosophy Today, 2023
Professor Dag Nikolaus Hasse and his team at the Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg (Germany) are among the major contributors to the development of digital humanities in the field of medieval philosophy with two (complementary) long-term projects: the “Arabic and Latin Glossary” (ALGloss), since 2005, and “Arabic and Latin Corpus” (ALCorpus), since 2016. The ALGloss, funded by the Deutsche Vorschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and previously by the Volkswagen Foundation (Hannover), is a freely accessible online lexicon of the vocabulary of medieval authors writing in Arabic and their medieval Latin translators. It is based on 42 sources and covers terminology from a variety of different sciences, including philosophy, theology, astronomy, medicine, botany, among others. The ALCorpus, funded by the DFG’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, is a digital collection of Arabic-Latin translations of the 10th to 14th centuries. It comprehends a total of 104 digital texts, in Arabic and in Latin, up until this date. Fifty more texts, many of which related to the field of magic and the occult sciences, will soon be made available.
HAZINE, 2013
The mass digitization of manuscripts is blurring the long held boundaries between manuscript libraries and archives and altering the act of research in the process. Scholars often view the changes that digitization entails in a negative light as the physical document is increasingly removed from the hands of the researcher. Here, though, I would like to take a different approach and explore the true possibilities provided by digitization as scholars are able to ask new questions, discover unknown texts, and gain a different understanding of intellectual life in the early modern Islamic world in particular. My belief is that a fundamental shift has occurred now that researchers can view twenty, fifty, or even one hundred manuscripts a day rather than two to three. In what follows, I examine some of the techniques we can use and the insights we can gain when given the opportunity to look at thousands of manuscripts during a research period.
University of Michigan. Without their curation efforts over the years-indeed, over the centurieshistorians such as myself would be all but useless. The present wave of digitization efforts that librarians have been pioneering will continue to make the kind of research conducted for this study more and more feasible, and I hope that those of us in medieval Islamic studies and related fields will rise to the occasion of utilizing and sharing with our students the incredible resources they are making available. I would like extend particular thanks to Jon Rodgers, Near East librarian at the Hatcher Graduate Library, as well as to his associate Evyn Kropf, with whom I first had the pleasure of working as a cataloger in the library's recent effort to re-catalog and digitize its Islamic manuscript collections.
NML490H1S - Readings in Classical Arabic from the Age of the Crusades
Course Description: Using the extant medieval Arabic literary corpus as primary sources, coupled with secondary scholarly literature in English, this course will provide a historical and historiographical survey of the Crusades from an Arabo-Islamic perspective. It will examine the Muslim responses to the Crusades, from the beginning of the movement at the 1096 call for the First Crusade to Salah al-Din’s conquest of Frankish Jerusalem and the stalemate of the Third Crusade (1093). The course will examine each period within this era by sampling in Arabic the remarkably rich, Arabo-Islamic corpus dating from the classical medieval period. Students will read historiographical sources, such as passages from universal chronicles, regnal biographies, dynastic histories, and biographical dictionaries; literary sources, such as poetry, travelogue literature, and autobiography; as well as religious texts, such as Qur’an, hadith, tafsir, jihad treatises, and fada’il (religious merits of cities) literature that inform the Islamic response to the Crusades. The course will conclude by examining the legacy of the Crusades in the modern Middle East and their depiction in modern politics, history, religion, and culture. By the end of the course, students will develop gradual proficiency and familiarity in Classical Arabic through reading different samples of historical, religious, and cultural literature pertaining to the Age of the Crusades.