Biographical dictionaries seem to be, for the researchers in the Islamic Arabic library, both a blessing and a curse.Wadād al-Qād ̣ī 1Speculum 92/S1 (October 2017).

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.

Defining digital humanities is tricky. Our scholarship has been intrinsically digital for quite a few decades already, as we rely more and more on electronic storage to save, word processors to write, bibliography managers to organize, databases to consult, digital libraries to search and read. Living in the digital world, however, does not make us all digital humanists—if these digital entities are taken away, we will have their analog prototypes to fall back on, and beyond a certain level of inconvenience, this will not affect the way most of us do our scholarship. The transition to digital humanities must begin somewhere at the point where our humanistic inquiry starts to rely on the machine as the matter of methodological exigency.

Abstract:A comparison of the results of the computational analysis of the

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