Computer-Mediated Analysis of Arabic Sources

Within the framework of my doctoral research I have been exploring the ways of in-depth computer-assisted analysis of biographical records in Arabic historical sources. The number of available records, ranging from short notices with little more than a name and dates of life to detailed biographies, reaches hundreds of thousands. They are included in an array of chronicles and biographical dictionaries; the biggest collection of such kind, the Taʾrīḫ al-Islām of al-Ḏahabī (d. 1347), includes over 30,000 biographical records.
The potential of these biographical data for the social historian of the Muslim world has been long recognized but few scholars ventured to approach the matter. In the 1970s and 80s, on the wave of popularity of quantitative methods in history, several scholars from different countries conducted methodologically similar studies, largely independently from each other. However, only few remained faithful to this approach and came up with more than just one study. The main reason for that was that such studies were extremely laborious and time-consuming. In the late 1990s, advancements of computer technologies stimulated a few more attempts. However, since the main “bottleneck” of manual data entry remained unresolved, a number of projects were never finished.
After my first unsuccessful attempt to create a database for the study of Arabic historical sources almost ten years ago, I am now full of hopes that there is an efficient way of overcoming the limitations of conventional relational databases. Taking advantage of the large corpus of Arabic historical texts that have recently become digitally available, the wide acceptance of the Unicode standard, and the possibilities offered by scripting languages one can now approach the issue from a different angle.