ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Digitizing Geographical Data in Tabular Form: Examples from Abū al-Fidāʾ’s Taqwīm al-buldān

• In Event: DH in the History of Premodern Sciences 1

English Abstract

The increasing availability of digitized manuscripts and developments in digital humanities have opened fresh avenues in the history of medieval science. As historians of science and philosophy, our team has been developing a web-based, collaborative research platform focused on the study of scientific and philosophical manuscripts of the premodern Islamic world, called Dabīrān. In 2024, one of our sub-projects, Idrīsī: An Open Library of Historical Geography of the Premodern Islamic World received a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Idrīsī aims to create the digital infrastructure for encoding, synthesizing, and analyzing toponyms and geographical data from the vast corpus of premodern Islamic texts, in both manuscript and print forms.
This presentation will focus on the work completed in the Idrīsī project, with an emphasis on the digital methods that have been developed for capturing geographical data in tabular form. Drawing on examples from the manuscripts of Abū al-Fidāʾ’s (d. 1311) Taqwīm al-buldān, the presentation will demonstrate how tables in manuscripts are digitally analyzed and transcribed, and how geographical data (e.g., coordinates, distances between localities, and relative positions) are encoded using the tools developed for the Idrīsī project. The presentation will also offer some reflections on the challenges that we encountered in developing digital approaches to encoding and studying tabular data, as well as invite discussions on the opportunities to expand this work to consider different kinds of tabular data and a broader range of sources for geographical data.

Author

• Fateme Savadi