September 6 Seminar: "Current work of the OpenITI and Kitab Projects: Resources and Challenges"

In this session, I introduce currently available resources from the KITAB/OpenITI projects and provide a sneak preview of in-progress digital research applications. I then discuss key challenges involved in working with our corpus and methods. The session will encourage discussion and involve demonstrations.

Professor Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University-ISMC) is a cultural historian, focusing on early Islamic history and history writing up to 1400, with a special focus on Iraq and Iran. She is the author of The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, given by the International Society for Iranian Studies on behalf of the Persian Heritage Foundation. Her other publications include The Excellence of the Arabs: A Translation of Ibn Qutaybah’s Faḍl al-ʿArab wa l-tanbīh ʿalā ʿulūmihā (with Peter Webb; The Library of Arabic Literature; Abu Dhabi: New York University Press, 2016), as well as articles and edited volumes dealing with ethnic identity, cultural memory, genealogy, and history writing. Her current project focuses on the history of books in the Middle East. With a team and partners she is developing digital methods to collect texts and to study the origins and development of the Arabic and Persian textual traditions. Her next monograph arises from this work, and interrogates concepts of the book and authorship. Please see kitab-project.org and https://github.com/OpenITI.