Chapter 15 People Versus Books

William A. Graham is an influential and pioneering scholar of Islamic Studies at Harvard University. This volume brings together seventeen contributions to the study of the Qur’an and Islam, all influenced by his work. Contributions to this collection, by his colleagues and students, treat many different aspects of Islamic scripture, from textual interpretation and hermeneutics to recitation and parallels with the Bible. Other chapters tackle in diverse ways the question of what it means to be "Islamic," and how such an identity may be constituted and maintained in history, thought and learning. A final section reflects on the career of William Graham and the relation of scholarship to the undervalued tasks of academic administration, especially where the study of religion is concerned. This book will be of interest to readers of Islamic Studies, Qur’anic Studies, Islamic history, Religious Studies, scripture, exegesis, and history of the book. Given Graham’s role at the Harvard Divinity School, and the discussions of how he has shaped the study of religion, the volume should be of interest to readership across the study of religion as a whole

Volume 5: Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies : Understanding the Past

Genealogy is one of the most important and authoritative organising principles of Muslim societies. From the Prophet’s day to the present, ideas about kinship and descent have shaped tribal, ethnic, sectarian and other identities. An understanding of genealogy is therefore vital to our understanding of Muslim societies, particularly with regard to the generation, preservation and manipulation of genealogical knowledge. This book addresses the subject through a range of case studies that link genealogical knowledge to the particular circumstances in which it was created, circulated and promoted. They stress the malleability of kinship and memory, and the interests this malleability served.https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_emc/1000/thumbnail.jp

Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture: Visualisation, Data Mining, Communication

Publication in open access thanks to the support of the SNSF Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture presents an overview of the digital turn in Ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts visualisation, data mining and communication. Edited by David Hamidović, Claire Clivaz and Sarah Bowen Savant, it gathers together the contributions of seventeen scholars involved in Biblical, Early Jewish and Christian studies. The volume attests to the spreading of digital humanities in these fields and presents fundamental analysis of the rise of visual culture as well as specific test-cases concerning ancient manuscripts. Sophisticated visualisation tools, stylometric analysis, teaching and visual data, epigraphy and visualisation belong notably to the varied overview presented in the volume

The dissemination of the Digital Humanities within research on Biblical, Early Jewish and Christian Studies

International audienc

Tell me something I don\u27t know! : The place and politics of digital methods in the (Islamicate) humanities

Debates about the value of digital methods often return to the nature of knowledge itself. Specifically, do not digital methods tell us what we intuitively already know? Or, if we do not know something yet, is it trivial or discoverable through other more traditional humanistic modes of analysis

Digitizing the textual heritage of the premodern islamicate world: Principles and plans

The varied textual traditions of the premodern Islamicate World represent an opportunity and a problem for the Digital Humanities (DH). The opportunity lies in the sheer extent of this textual heritage: if we combine the textual output of premodern Persian and Arabic authors (not to mention Turkish and other less well-represented Islamicate languages), this body of texts constitutes arguably the largest written repository of human culture. Analytical methods developed for other linguistic heritages can be repurposed to make use of this wealth of texts, and efforts are now underway to apply to them a series of computationally enhanced methods that derive from a variety of disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, the social sciences, and statistics). The application of these forms of analysis to these large new corpora promises new insights on premodern Islamicate cultures and the improvement of existing digital tools and methodologies

Important new developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) team building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for printed classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines(~400 pages, 87,000 words; see Table 1 for full details). These accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual 2 accuracy rates of the various proprietary OCR options for printed classical Arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source OCR software called Kraken (developed by Benjamin Kiessling, LU