Call for Participation: KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book)
Sarah Savant, a faculty member at our partner institution, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at The Aga Khan University, who also has lectured at Columbia on digital humanities, has announced that there are still openings for interested researchers for the below call. If you’re interested apply directly below!
The KITAB project is seeking researchers who are interested in collaborating to advance their own, distinct research projects. The aim is to build a small group of academics (6-8) who will work with our corpus of 1.5 billion words of pre-modern Arabic texts (700-1500) and our datasets (including for text reuse especially). Members of the KITAB team will provide a week’s worth of training in the April 2021. In July 2021, we will host a further meeting in which participants will present papers that are informed by their work with the project.
Both visits to London will be funded by the European Research Council, which supports the project.
Who is eligible?
This call is especially for junior scholars – advanced PhD students and recently completed PhDs – who are working on topics that would benefit from methods of computational analysis.
Description of the project
The KITAB project focuses on the history of Arabic books using digital methods, especially text reuse detection. Based in London, the project is currently funded by the European Research Council, the Qatar National Library, and the Mellon Foundation. For more on the project, see: http://kitab-project.org/. Our corpus of books, available through the OpenITI, can be read with a text editor and is available here: https://github.com/OpenITI/ .
Training
We will determine the training best suited to the pool of applicants. Some examples would include:
Working with command line, working with GitHub
Introduction to the OpenITI: its organisation, mARkdown, betacode, and metadata
Regular expressions: how they work and what they can do for you
Reading data through PowerBi
Working with python: basics, data manipulation
Working with R: basics, social network analysis, stylometry
Basics of the OCR workflow (eScriptorium)
To apply
Please submit a statement of no more than 750 words to Nadia Bhaloo (Nadia.Bhaloo@aku.edu), ccing to Anjum Alam (anjum.alam@aku.edu), by Sept. 1. In your statement, please elaborate your research interests, your prior exposure to digital methods (with a couple of examples), and possible topics you would like to explore with the KITAB team.
Prior to the meeting in February we will share with you materials to review.
N.B. By joining us, we would expect you to work on a publishable paper based on our data for completion by December 2021.