Sarah Savant, A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writerly Practices and Text Reuse

On Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Sarah Savant (Aga Khan University) will present “A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writerly Practices and Text Reuse.” This talk explores how one could reconstruct how major authors in the Arabic language from the eighth to sixteenth centuries wrote their books– the sources they used, what they copied out, and the scholars they knew. For most of these authors, reusing earlier works was the starting point for creating new ones. They abbreviated long works to make short ones, commented on short ones to make long ones, and mined general histories to compose works on specific themes. In these and many other ways, authors produced an enormously intertextual tradition, shaping how later individuals and communities would remember their pasts and conceive of their affiliations to groups bound by locality, profession, religion, tribe, ethnicity and other shared traits. To make the reconstruction of these relations possible on a large scale, the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, & the Arabic Book) project built a digital corpus of thousands of these early Arabic books comprising more than two billion words. The talk addresses topics ranging from religion, philosophy and language to history, geography, medicine and astronomy, that were written over the first ten centuries of Islam in a region spanning from modern Spain to Central and South Asia. The team then utilized a text reuse detection algorithm to create an original data set that documents word-for-word relationships among all these books. This talk will visualize and investigate the broad patterns of text reuse using the KITAB data set and forensically analyze individual works to observe the tradition both from a satellite perspective and through a microscope, as it were.