Project Background
The impetus behind creating mutūn grew out of a realization that many of the developments of leading projects in the Islamicate digital humanities remain out of reach of the non-technical user. In particular, there are two primary domains that we look to make accessible: textual corpora and textual analysis. (1) The pioneering work of projects like the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) and the KITAB Project has created a meta-corpus of thousands of digitized Arabic works. For the most part, there is no way to easily and efficiently access these texts without the requisite technical skills. (2) The same can be said of the novel natural language processing tools developed for Arabic-script texts, like those produced by the CAMeL Lab for word-level analysis.
The mutūn platform therefore seeks to address these issues of accessibility and empower researchers and readers alike by making these texts and tools available in a user-friendly web platform. The project will be developed in four stages before moving to testing.
- The first stage is a metadata browser with advanced filtering capabilities.
- The second stage is to develop a reader app with basic search capabilities.
- The third stage is to build the advanced search functionality and user-defined mini-corpora.
- The final stage is to incorporate word-level text analysis.
We plan to complete the fourth stage by the start of the 2024-25 academic year. There are other long-term goals and increased functionality that will be incorporated into the project beyond this four-stage development plan.
Our Team
Principal Investigator and Lead Developer
Antonio is currently a PhD candidate at New York University and the Founder and Lead Developer of mutūn. He is broadly interested in the study of Islamic piety, the relationship between Late Antiquity and early Muslim religiosity, and the emergence and formation of Sufism. He is also the lead developer and founder of nuṣūṣ, a corpus of digitally neglected texts.
Team Member
Jeremy holds a Ph.D. from Emory University. His research analyzes the formation and evolution of religious movements, particularly Sufism, through text-critical and computational approaches. He is currently preparing a monograph on the re-use of the corpus compiled by Jaʿfar al-Khuldī, which includes the critically edited reconstructed text of an early Sufi prosopographical work.
Team Member
Giovanni (Gio) is a PhD student at Harvard's Committee for the Study of Religion. His research broadly studies late ancient and early medieval Eastern Christian intellectual history; he is particularly interested in using the methods of digital humanities and new philology to better understand the transmission and transformation of texts in this context.
Team Member
Muhammed is an NLP researcher at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research is concerned with Arabic treebanks and syntactic parsing. He received an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Georgia, Athens.
Acknowledgements
We won initital funding to develop the mutūn platform through NYU's Faculty Digital Humanities Seed Grant.
Contribute
We are not currently looking to grow our team, but if you are interested in learning more about the project or for potential collaborations with your own project, please do not hesitate to email us! For regular updates, you can sign up on our home page.
Contact Us
You can email us here, and we will get back to you as soon as possible!