Dr Sarah Bowen Savant, an Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, has won a grant from the European Research Council.
The €2 million award will support the development of Dr Savant’s KITAB project, a pioneering digital initiative that is providing new cultural insights from over 6,000 Arabic texts from the pre-modern Islamic world, from 750AD to 1500AD).
KITAB is an online toolbox created by an international team of experts in information technology, Arabi
c history and philology (the study of the development of languages). Its central innovation has been the use of algorithms to identify common and repeated passages in separate texts thereby shedding light on how ideas and memory were recorded and shared during this rich and influential period of Islamic history.
Dr Savant describes how the medieval Arabic textual tradition is one of the most prolific in human history. “Works were produced across a territory stretching from modern Spain to Central Asia, and their subject matter covered Islam but also much more, from rulers, their courts, and administration to literature, biographies, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, geography, travel, and many other topics,” she adds.
The grant will support the hiring of a technical lead, who will develop data visualisations and analytics spanning the entire corpus of work under the project, as well as seven research staff who will expand on the existing team’s work to explore how Islamic heritage was shaped and filtered during the period.
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KITAB is a group endeavour that depends entirely on teamwork,” Dr Savant said. “A group of incredibly dedicated volunteers have contributed vast amounts of skills and time to get us to this point and this grant allows us to hire people who will enable us to build a completely new picture of how memory functioned and ideas travelled across time and the regions of the Middle East,” Dr Savant said.
The new phase of work is expected to begin in May 2018.