The varied textual traditions of the premodern Islamicate World represent an opportunity and a problem for the Digital Humanities (DH). The opportunity lies in the sheer extent of this textual heritage: if we combine the textual output of premodern Persian and Arabic authors (not to mention Turkish and other less well-represented Islamicate languages), this body of texts constitutes arguably the largest written repository of human culture. Analytical methods developed for other linguistic heritages can be repurposed to make use of this wealth of texts, and efforts are now underway to apply to them a series of computationally enhanced methods that derive from a variety of disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, the social sciences, and statistics). The application of these forms of analysis to these large new corpora promises new insights on premodern Islamicate cultures and the improvement of existing digital tools and methodologies.

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Historical treatments of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval Persian poetry typically identify their origin in the Sufi poetry of Bābā Tāher, Abu Saʿid, and Sanāʾi and portray them as a poetic instantiation of the intellectual and antinomian critiques of the formalistic modes of piety practiced in the increasingly powerful institutionalized Sufi orders. However, the qalandari panegyrics of the Saljuq court poets Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi—arguably the earliest datable examples of this poetry—analyzed in this article complicate this narrative. They utilize the heterotopic poetics of the qalandariyyāt not to subvert or critique, but rather to augment the sociopolitical authority of the ruler of Qazvin, constructing a new and distinctly Saljuq model of Islamic kingship, a Qalandar King.

This work presents an accuracy study of the open source OCR engine, Kraken, on the leading Arabic scholarly journal, al-Abhath. In contrast with other commercially available OCR engines, Kraken is shown to be capable of producing highly accurate Arabic-script OCR. The study also assesses the relative accuracy of typeface-specific and generalized models on the al-Abhath data and provides a microanalysis of the “error instances” and the contextual features that may have contributed to OCR misrecognition. Building on this analysis, the paper argues that Arabic-script OCR can be significantly improved through (1) a more systematic approach to training data production, and (2) the development of key technological components, especially multi-language models and improved line segmentation and layout analysis./Cet article présente une étude d’exactitude du moteur ROC open source, Krakan, sur la revue académique arabe de premier rang, al-Abhath. Contrairement à d’autres moteurs ROC disponibles sur le marché, Kraken se révèle être capable de produire de la ROC extrêmement exacte de l’écriture arabe. L’étude évalue aussi l’exactitude relative des modèles spécifiquement configurés à des polices et celle des modèles généralisés sur les données d’al-Abhath et fournit une microanalyse des « occurrences d’erreurs », ainsi qu’une microanalyse des éléments contextuels qui pourraient avoir contribué à la méreconnaissance ROC. S’appuyant sur cette analyse, cet article fait valoir que la ROC de l’écriture arabe peut être considérablement améliorée grâce à (1) une approche plus systématique d’entraînement de la production de données et (2) grâce au développement de composants technologiques fondamentaux, notammentl’amélioration des modèles multilingues, de la segmentation de ligne et de l’analyse de la mise en page.

He also accepts the cogency of Hegel's criticisms of Kant. He rejects, however, the idea that Hegel's critique applies to discourse ethics. After a brief exposition of discourse ethics, Habermas identifies what he understands to be the key points of similarity and difference between his theory and Kant's. Then he explains the degree to which four of Hegel's most trenchant criticisms of Kant apply to discourse ethics. 3 He claims, "Hegel's objections apply less to the reformulations of Kantian ethics itself than to a number of resulting problems that discourse ethics cannot be expected to resolve in a single stroke." 4 Habermas argues that the problems with discourse ethics do not stem from its justification but rather its application. He professes a firm belief in the ability of moral argumentation to produce a political situation in which the competing aims of individual rights and solidarity are realized.The general aim of this essay is to respond to Habermas and to reexamine the Hegelian idea that the issues of justification and application cannot really be separated. In what follows, I will review the similarities that Habermas acknowledges between discourse ethics and Kant's moral philosophy. Second, I will argue that the differences that Habermas sees between himself and Kant are inessential. Habermas' rethinking of the universalist project does not move it beyond Kant in any fundamental way. Finally, I will argue that discourse ethics, despite Habermas' protests, is just as susceptible to Hegelian critique as Kant's moral philosophy. Habermas asserts that U bridges the gaps between the interests of the participants in a moral discourse. The various normative validity claims introduced by participants in a moral discourse can be redeemed only through this general rule.Another feature that discourse ethics and Kant's practical philosophy share is an emphasis on the cognitive dimension of morality. A moral theory is cognitivist if it sets forth an explicit principle of justification (e.g. the C.I., or principle U). It must provide an answer to the question of why one moral norm is better than some other norm which conflicts with it. Habermas contends that justification of moral norms is analogous to the justification process that goes on in the natural and social sciences when truth claims are made. 9The participant in moral argumentation must seek to discursively redeem his claim of normative rightness. He must provide reasons for his claim and open it to public scrutiny. Habermas is careful, however, to observe a strict separation between the normative and theoretical spheres, which avoids the KANT, HEGEL, AND HABERMAS 65 reduction of ethics to science. He sees such a reduction as characteristic of intuitionsim and value ethics. 10He explains this separation into spheres by claiming that theoretical discourse examines truth claims about the world, while normative discourse investigates claims about the lightness of our intersubjectivly constructed social arrangements.Habermas division follows from Kant's s...