The Islamicate-DH (I-DH) site is a clearinghouse for news and pedagogical resources related to the Islamicate Digital Humanities (I-DH). It will also be the home to the exciting new Global Classrooms course, The Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamic Cultures through Computational Textual Analysis, which will be offered for the first time in the fall of 2016 through the University of Maryland (College Park) and Universität Leipzig. It is our hope that these course materials and other “How-To” articles that we publish at the I-DH site will aid you in becoming an “I-DHer” (Islamicate Digital Humanist).
I-DH Editors
Cameron Cross is an Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan. He specializes in classical Persian literature, especially the epic, lyric, panegyric, romantic, and didactic verse of the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Chief among his interests is the study of romantic/epic poetry from the standpoint of narrative, structure, morality, gender, context, and intertext. He currently is working on a monograph exploring these topics in Vis & Ramin by Fakhroddin Gorgani. Alongside this monograph, he also is developing a number of articles that touch on the following topics: the “rise of the romance” in Persian, Greek, and European literature; the implications of Alexander’s quest for immortality in the Shāhnāma; speech, silence, and symbols in the Haft Paykar; and the question of genre in classical/medieval Persian narrative. See his university and personal websites for more details.
Matthew Thomas Miller is a Roshan Institute Research Fellow and the Associate Director of the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD) at the University of Maryland, College Park. He also serves as the co-PI for the multi-institutional Islamicate Texts Initiative (ITI) and Persian Manuscripts Initiative (PMI). Previously he was a dissertation fellow at Washington University in St. Louis (2013-2014), Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Fellow (2012-2013), and Mellon Sawyer Graduate Fellow (2011-2012). He currently is working on a book project, entitled The Poetics Sufi Carnival: The ‘Rogue Lyrics’ (Qalandariyât) of Sanâ’i, ‘Attâr, and ‘Erâqi, and a number of articles on the topics of: (1) sexuality and embodiment in the medieval Persian world, and (2) computational (“distant reading”) approaches to Persian literature. See his website for more details.
Maxim Romanov is a research fellow at Alexander von Humboldt-Lehrstul für Digital Humanities, Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig. His dissertation (Near Eastern Studies, U of Michigan, 2013) explored how modern computational techniques of text analysis can be applied to the study of premodern Arabic historical sources. In particular, he studied The History of Islam (Taʾrīḫ al-islām), the largest of surviving biographical collections with over 30,000 biographies, written by the Damascene scholar al-Ḏahabī (d. 1348 CE). He is continuing his research and develops methods of computational analysis for other genres of premodern Arabic literature, mainly large volume collections that can offer insights into long-term and large-scale developments that took place during the pre-modern period of Islamic history. He is working on two book projects: (1) “The History of Islam”: An Essay in Digital Humanities continues the study of al-Ḏahabī’s tremendous collection of biographies, while (2) The Gift to the Knowledgeable 2.0, explores cultural production in the Islamic world until the beginning of the 20th century through the study of the Hadiyyaŧ al-ʿārifīn, a bibliographical collection composed by Ismāʿīl Bāšā al-Baġdādī (d. 1920). See his website for more details.