Posts
Texts, Tools, and the Future of Islamicate Humanities: OpenITI Conversations
We know that our colleagues across Islamicate humanities are working on a vast range of topics, incorporating innovative methods, tools, and theoretical approaches, and thinking about the implications of textual and other technologies on their subjects, research methods, and pedagogical practices. We all interact with texts in some form or…
Introducing the Digital Islamicate Humanities Survey
In today’s academic world, virtually every scholar in the humanities, Islamicate and otherwise, engages with digital tools and methods of some sort. Whether it is through search engines, electronic catalogs, digitized manuscripts, electronic word processors, email, or social media, the use of digital resources and digital tools has become integral…
An Introduction and Invitation to the Safīnat al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ Manuscript Reading Group
After a break over the summer, we will be picking our OpenITI manuscript reading group back up for the fall academic semester, with a somewhat different iteration from previous semesters. In the past we have taken a somewhat ad hoc approach to our reading material, focusing on one manuscript for…
From Scroll to Scrolling: On Genre, Textual Technology, and Unexpected Transformations
During a recent one of our Thursday manuscript reading group sessions we explored a curious work produced in 913/1507 somewhere in the Ottoman lands and now held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, shelfmark Cod. turc. 41. The catalog describes it as a ‘talisman,’ though as we will see this is…
Hunting for Unusual Characters in Arabic Script Manuscripts
One of the most potent affordances of manuscript textual production, as opposed to typographic or digital print, is the simple fact that handwriting permits a lot more variation and even downright weirdness in what ends up on the page…
Introducing Our Survey of Digital Workflows Project
Something one often hears in the context of introductions to or apologetics for digital humanities is the idea that all scholars today are in some degree or another “digital humanists.” And while it sounds at this point a bit cliché, it is in fact true: just about everyone who works…
A New Journal of Islamicate DH and A Proposal for an Article Workshopping Group
My OpenITI colleague Taimoor Shahid and I were recently able to—virtually—sit down and have a productive conversation with Eid Ahmed Mohamed and Mai Zaki, the editors of the quite newly launched (first issue comes out in a couple of months) Journal of Digital Islamicate Research, discussing their vision for the…
Introducing the ACDC Project, Part I: Training Data Production and the Diversity of the Islamicate Manuscript Tradition
One of OpenITI’s major deliverables in our most recent round of work is the Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project and ensuing tool, which we are now making available for wider use and experimentation: the relevant code and instructions for installation and use are available on Github, and additional…
The Year in Review: Reflections on OpenITI Pedagogy and Outreach in 2023
As 2023 draws to a close, I wanted to use this last blog post of the year to reflect on OpenITI’s pedagogical and outreach work, or at least the parts with which I have been closely associated. Over the course of the last year, I put together and oversaw two…
Digital Islamicate Manuscript Studies: A Literature Review and Manuscript Walk-Through
I have been meaning to do a review article covering useful resources, recent articles, and other matters that have come up in the course of our fall manuscript studies reading group, but kept putting it off, reasoning I ought to wait until the end of the semester (that, and I…