Digital Humanities for Arabic and Islamic Studies

A Proposition for the Field

Series: 

Author:
Maxim Romanov
In Digital Humanities for Arabic and Islamic Studies, Maxim Romanov proposes a bold vision for bringing Arabic and Islamic Studies fully into the digital age. Building on the vast OpenITI corpus—over a billion words spanning 1,400 years—Romanov demonstrates how computational tools can illuminate long-term cultural and linguistic developments across the Islamic world. Through accessible case studies on terminology tracing, genre modeling, and linguistic change, the book shows how digital methods expand rather than replace traditional scholarship. Romanov argues that the field’s digital transformation must be led from within—by scholars who understand its texts, traditions, and questions. This book provides both a roadmap and an invitation to rethink how the Arabic and Islamic heritage can be studied in the twenty-first century.
Copyright Year:
2026
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-76053-0
Publication:
25 Jun 2026
Hardback
Availability:
Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-76052-3
Publication:
16 Jul 2026
Cover Digital Humanities for Arabic and Islamic Studies

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Maxim Romanov, Ph.D. (University of Michigan, 2013), is Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Hamburg. A specialist in Digital Humanities and Arabic and Islamic Studies, he directs the DFG project The Evolution of Islamic Societies (600–1600 CE) and co-founded the OpenITI corpus.
Acknowledgments
List of Figures and Tables
Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1 A Pitch for Digital Humanities
 1 The Premise
 2 The Inescapable Digital Turn
 3 The Ailment
 4 The Remedy
 5 The Ghost of the Network
 6 The Pitch
 7 The Proposition

2 Digital Avatars and Metaobjects
 1 Issues of the Text
 2 Issues of the Corpus
 3 Toward an Engineering Solution
 4 Digital Pragmatism
 5 Approaching Corpus Design
 6 Linked Local Data
 7 Uniform Resource Identifiers
 8 URI-Based Local Structure
 9 Encoding Conventions
 10 Handling Metadata
 11 The Hub That Makes It All Work
 12 Corpus Releases
 13 mARkdown as a Text Annotation Scheme
 14 A Working Subcorpus

3 Computational Inquiries
 1 Outlining Practical Premises
 2 Case Study 1. Tracing Term Usage
 3 Case Study 2. Modeling Textual Typology
 4 Case Study 3. Charting Linguistic Evolution

Afterword

Glossary of Common DH Terms
Bibliography
Index
All scholars and students of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Digital Humanities, and Middle Eastern history, as well as those studying other written traditions or interested in computational approaches to cultural analysis.
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