Exploring Cultural Memory in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (700–1500): Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book

Project Information

KITAB

Grant agreement ID: 772989

DOI

10.3030/772989

Project closed

EC signature date 26 April 2018

Start date 1 May 2018

End date 31 December 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 994 536,17

EU contribution

€ 1 994 536,17

Coordinated by

THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY (INTERNATIONAL) IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - KITAB (Exploring Cultural Memory in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (700–1500):Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book)

Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

One of the most spectacularly prolific traditions in human history, the medieval Islamic world witnessed a literary outpouring surpassing the extant production of any other pre-print culture except perhaps imperial China or Sanskritic India. The goal of the KITAB project was to develop and use technology to study the history of the Arabic book (700–1500) and its role in shaping cultural memory in the Islamic world. Authors in this period frequently reused earlier works, repurposing them to suit an evolving present and imagined future. We specifically sought to document, classify, describe, and analyse such reuse of works across a corpus of more than 2 billion words. We built our project around the concept of ‘text reuse’. The term is intended to be value-neutral and encompasses a variety of writerly practices, though in our case, we sought evidence in the form of near-verbatim alignments between works representing extended, nonformulaic, and stemmatic text reuse. We sought to balance a distant reading of alignments across the corpus with case studies.

Our objectives entailed:
1. The development of an open-access corpus of machine-actionable texts, technological base, and web platform for detecting text reuse in the premodern Arabic tradition.
2. Cross-temporal and cross-regional studies of the history of the book using computational text reuse detection methods and grounded in specific case studies by experts.
3. Identification and exploration of the workings of cultural memory as a dynamic process in which the contents of memory are continually shaped and reshaped by social actors.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project’s major work and accomplishments were (in relation to the above-stated objectives):

1. Corpus, technological base, and web platform. We released eight versions of the corpus (latest version: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10021513) plus two full-corpus-linked versions of our text reuse data (latest version: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11501559). The corpus and reuse data are now featured in the Digital Library of the Middle East: https://dlmenetwork.org/library/browse/group/recently-added/openiti. We detected more than 1.6 million overlaps between pairs of books and mapped the relationship of every book to all others in the corpus. Our open access web platform (kitab-project.org/explore) allows other researchers, including those without technical backgrounds, to explore our texts, data, visualisations, and findings. We also partnered with other projects such as the Arabic-Script Optical Character Recognition Catalyst Project (AOCP) to improve automated text recognition for both print and handwritten texts; developed computational methods to track and analyse citations; and created a Python library in wide use by other projects. We relied more on machine learning than we had planned, which prepared us for the major developments, towards the end of the project, in AI.

2. History of the book in Arabic. The project team produced four monographs; two PhD dissertations; and thirteen journal articles and book chapters treating the following themes:

Authorial practices: Topics included premodern understandings of authorship, the cultural meanings associated with different forms of transmission, and ideas about originality. We used quantitative analysis, assessing, for example, the proportional representation of highly prolific authors in the overall textual tradition: we were surprised that these authors reused earlier works at approximately the same rates as less prolific authors.

Changing forms of the book: We problematized the very idea of the Arabic book as a fixed entity, exploring instead the ways in which textual fragments in books took on lives of their own within anthologies, encyclopaedias, multi-text compilations (majmūʿāt), commentaries, and abridgements (mukhtaṣars) and extensions of books. We distinguished writerly practices across the period as distinct from later print culture, as we emphasized the persons and networks that produced and reproduced texts.

Narrative adaptations. We looked closely at how frequently copied texts and parts of texts were adapted over time, with the objective of discerning the formation of narratives, often in conflict with one another, out of heterogeneous past material. We considered specific communities and such changes to narrative to discern interests at work in the development of textual meanings.

3. Identification and exploration of the workings of cultural memory. We connected our work on book history to cultural memory, as we focused on how memories were communicated, circulated, and exchanged in the medieval Islamic world; how the recombination of previous texts in new book forms revealed the ways in which groups defined themselves; and how groups, through texts, negotiated their shared pasts. These topics were treated in our publications above, but also in the very architecture of the project itself, as we built the data sets and visualisations to document changes across time (the best example being our ‘one-to-many’ data visualisation, which enables investigation of the prevalence of a theme across time).

Regarding the monographs, two companion volumes will be released in 2026 through Edinburgh University Press: The Making of the Arabic Book: How Text Reuse Built a World Tradition (Sarah Bowen Savant, with Masoumeh Seydi as data co-creator) and Digital Explorations of Memory and Community Formation Through Text Reuse (Mathew Barber, Lorenz Nigst, Aslisho Qurboniev, Gowaart Van Den Bossche and Peter Verkinderen). A further two volumes treating book history were produced by Van Den Bossche (De Gruyter, 2023), Literary Spectacles of Sultanship: Historiography, the Chancery, and Social Practice in Late Medieval Egypt, and Maxim Romanov, Digital Humanities for Arabic and Islamic Studies: A Proposition for the Field (De Gruyter Brill, 2026).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

In addition to the above, we built a user community through online documentation and resources, online and in-person training sessions, dedicated thematic workshops (including on citational practices), conference presentations (approximately 100 across the years), and our annual Arabic Pasts workshop. Our web application has as of 2025 approximately 1,000 users per month. In the final year of the project, the PI founded at her host institution a Centre for Digital Humanities, one of the world’s first dedicated to Islamicate contexts.

The team spent significant time investigating ways that the text reuse data could itself be reused for library systems, in additional reading environments, and in museums. The PI and team designed a pipeline to enhance search and suggestion functions within library search engines. Furthermore, the PI acquired additional funding during the course of the project to hire three team members to build a web application for the Qatar National Library. This application used text reuse alignments to show the history of the Prophet Muhammad’s biography.

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