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DTSTAMP:20260516T211506Z
CREATED:20241216T214508Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241216T214508Z
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250408T123000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250408T133000
SUMMARY: Sarah Savant\, A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Expl
 orations of Writerly Practices and Text Reuse
DESCRIPTION: On Tuesday\, April 8\, 2025\, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom\
 , Professor Sarah Savant (Aga Khan University) will present “A Cultural His
 tory of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writerly Practices and Tex
 t Reuse.” This talk explores how one could reconstruct how major authors in
  the Arabic language from the eighth to sixteenth centuries wrote […]
X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html: <p>On Tuesday\, April 8\, 2025\, at 12:30-1:3
 0PM US EST via Zoom\, Professor Sarah Savant (Aga Khan University) will pre
 sent "A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writer
 ly Practices and Text Reuse." This talk explores how one could reconstruct 
 how major authors in the Arabic language from the eighth to sixteenth centu
 ries wrote their books– the sources they used\, what they copied out\, and 
 the scholars they knew. For most of these authors\, reusing earlier works w
 as 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 ge
 neral histories to compose works on specific themes. In these and many othe
 r ways\, authors produced an enormously intertextual tradition\, shaping ho
 w 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\, Informat
 ion Technology\, & the Arabic Book) project built a digital corpus of thous
 ands of these early Arabic books comprising more than two billion words. Th
 e talk addresses topics ranging from religion\, philosophy and language to 
 history\, geography\, medicine and astronomy\, that were written over the f
 irst ten centuries of Islam in a region spanning from modern Spain to Centr
 al and South Asia. The team then utilized a text reuse detection algorithm 
 to create an original data set that documents word-for-word relationships a
 mong all these books. This talk will visualize and investigate the broad pa
 tterns of text reuse using the KITAB data set and forensically analyze indi
 vidual works to observe the tradition both from a satellite perspective and
  through a microscope\, as it were.</p>
CATEGORIES:Speaker/Panel
LOCATION:Zoom
GEO:40.712728;-74.006015
ORGANIZER;CN="Ms Marzieh Noori":MAILTO:mnoori@law.harvard.edu
URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/sarah-savant-a-cultural-histor
 y-of-the-arabic-book-digital-explorations-of-writerly-practices-and-text-re
 use/
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