The digital humanities and Islamic & Middle East studies

Over the past few decades, humanistic inquiry has been problematized and invigorated by the emergence of what is referred to as the digital humanities. Across multiple disciplines, from history to literature, religious studies to philosophy, archaeology to music, scholars are tapping the extraordinary power of digital technologies to preserve, curate, analyze, visualize, and reconstruct their research objects. The study of the Middle East and the broader Islamic world has been no less impacted by this new paradigm. Scholars are making daily use of digital tools and repositories including private and state-sponsored archives of textual sources, digitized manuscript collections, densitometrical imaging, visualization and modeling software, and various forms of data mining and analysis. This collection of essays explores the state of the art in digital scholarship pertaining to Islamic & Middle Eastern studies, addressing areas such as digitization, visualization, text mining, databases, mapping, and e-publication. It is of relevance to any researcher interested in the opportunities and challenges engendered by this changing scholarly ecosystem.

Islamic and middle east studies and the digital turn / Elias Muhanna -- Uncertainty and the archive / Travis Zadeh -- Of making many copies there is no end: the digitization of manuscripts and printed books in Arabic script / Dagmar Riedel -- Al-Kindi on the Kindle: the library of Arabic literature and the challenges of publishing bilingual Arabic-English books / Chip Rossetti -- Working with grassroots digital humanities projects: the case of the Tall Al-za'tar facebook groups / Nadia Yaqub -- Toward abstract models for Islamic history / Maxim Romanov -- Quantifying the Quran / Alex Brey -- Mapping Ottoman Damascus through news reports: a practical approach / Till Grallert -- "Find for me!": building a context-based search tool using Python / José Haro Peralta and Peter Verkinderen -- Pedagogy and the digital humanities: undergraduate exploration into the transmitters of early Islamic law / Joel Blecher -- From basmati rice to the Bani Hilal: digital archives and public humanities / Dwight F. Reynolds.