Middle East Studies

“Distant Reading and the Islamic Archive” symposium

Friday, October 16, 2015

9:00am – 5:45pm

Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer St, Providence, RI 02906

The third annual Digital Islamic Humanities symposium was organized by Elias Muhanna, Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies. With generous funding from the Brown Humanities Research and Teaching Fund.

Each year, the number of digitized books, inscriptions, images, documents, and other artifacts from the Islamic world continues to grow. As this archive expands, so too does the repertoire of digital tools for navigating and interpreting its diffuse and varied contents. Drawing upon such tools as topic modeling, context-based search, social network maps, and text reuse algorithms, the study of large-scale archives and textual corpora is undergoing significant and exciting developments.

With this in mind, the Middle East Studies program at Brown University held its 3rd annual Islamic Digital Humanities Symposium, onFriday, October 16, 2015. Islamic Humanities Conference 2015

Workshops, Conferences, Seminars

Previous conferences:

On October 17-18, 2014, the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown University organized a workshop on “Textual Corpora” in the Digital Scholarship Lab at Rockefeller Library. We had around forty participants from various universities and institutions from around the world, and we spent a couple of days engaged in fruitful discussions and hands-on tutorial sessions.

October 24-25, 2013, the Digital Humanities + Islamic and Middle East Studies 

View recordings of the conference here and visit our MES playlist for more videos.