Digital Islamic Humanities Project - Resources

Digital Islamic Humanities Project - Resources

Thank you for visiting the site for the Digital Islamic Humanities Project, a research initiative led by Professor Elias Muhanna at Brown University. On October 24-25, 2013, we hosted an international conference on the Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies. The entire conference is available to watch online by clicking the webcast buttons in the upper right-hand corner of this site. Paper abstracts and participant bios can be found on this site, along with other resources, news, a blog, and a working bibliography.

Textual Databases

Al-Warraq: A searchable database of several hundred classical Arabic texts.
Al-Maktaba al-Shamela: Homepage for this downloadable library, comprising thousands of Arabic texts.
Digital Persian Archive: A database of Persian historical documents from Iran and Central Asia up to the 20th century.
Al-Maktaba al-Waqfiyya: Scanned PDFs of Arabic texts.
Multaqa Ahl al-Hadith: Scanned PDFs of Arabic texts.
Altafsir.com: Searchable database of dozens of classical and modern Arabic exegetical texts.
Qur’anic Arabic Corpus: An annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic grammar, syntax and morphology for each word in the Holy Quran. The corpus provides three levels of analysis: morphological annotation, a syntactic treebank and a semantic ontology.
Al-Mishkat: Searchable database of classical Arabic texts.
Al-Mostafa: Database of downloadable PDFs of Arabic texts, modern and classical.
Noor Library: A collection of digital texts in Persian.

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Manuscript/Image Databases and Catalogues

Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan, Michigan University Libraries, 2009-2012.  Crowd-sourced cataloging project. For a project description, see: Evyn Kropf and Jonathan Rodgers, “Collaboration in Cataloguing: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan,” MELA Notes 82 (2009): 17-29.
Die Damaszener Familienbibliothek Refaiya, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2008-2012.  The website provides access to digitized manuscripts as well as catalogs and research.
Fihrist: Islamic Manuscript Catalogue Online: British union catalogue for manuscripts in Arabic script.  The project originated with the Oxford and Cambridge Islamic Manuscript Catalogue Online (OCIMCO), 2009-2011.
Islamic Seals Database, Chester Beatty Library Dublin.  Crowd-sourced cataloguing project.

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Tools and Tutorials

Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
Conversion of Islamic and Christian Dates, website created by J. Thomann for the Institute of Oriental Studies at Zurich University, 1996-2010.  Conversion tools for the Coptic, Persian (Era of Yazdigird), Islamic lunar (AH), and Ottoman māliyyah calendars are available.
GeoTemCo: comparative visualization of temporal data by Stefan Jänicke.
GeoNames: a searchable directory of coordinates for locations around the world (just make sure that if you are looking for Medina, it is not Medina, OH)
iTouchMap: convenient for reverse geocoding, or getting the precise coordinates of what you can see on the map.
FCC.gov has a tool to convert coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds into decimal values.
EditPad Pro / EditPad Lite: a great text-editor that easily handles long texts in Unicode and supports regular expressions;
Python tutorial: Online tutorial for this powerful dynamic programming language.
Regular Expressions: a tool for complex manipulations with patterned text.

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Dictionaries

Lane’s Arabic Lexicon: Available in the following locations: Alpheios (a part of reading tools for Mozilla Firefox; URL LookUp); Perseus Project (text/XML, browsable and searchable); Tyndale House (images, browsable by letters and roots).
Wehr-Lane-Hava Triptych: Search all three of these standard Arabic-English dictionaries on one page.
Steingass’s Persian-English Dictionary: Search the authoritative dictionary for classical Persian.

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Resource Pages, Blogs, and Bibliographies

Open Access Digital Resources by Dagmar Riedel (Columbia University)
A List of Resource Websites by Dagmar Riedel (Columbia University)
Al-Raqmiyyat.org: Maxim Romanov’s blog
Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies (COMSt), a research network program of the European Science Foundation (ESF), 2009-2014.
Archnet: Archnet is a globally-accessible, intellectual resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world. Archnet’s mission is to provide ready access to unique visual and textual material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and professional work of high quality. Officially launched in 2002 as a partnership between the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Archnet has since evolved into the largest open, online architectural library with a focus on Muslim cultures. Its digital archives form a comprehensive resource on architecture, urban design, landscape, development, and related issues. Archnet provides a bridge for interested persons to learn how to enhance the quality of the built environment, to compensate for lack of resources for students and faculty in academic institutions, and to highlight the culture and traditions of Islam.