ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Toward Computational Methods for the History of Science

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

English Abstract

ince 2018, the Dabīrān Research Group has developed computational methods for the
analysis and study of Islamic manuscripts. These software tools and AI pipelines are
tailored to the distinctive challenges of Arabic and Persian scientific manuscripts, for
which existing computational tools and training data are severely limited. This work has
produced specialized datasets, robust text recognition models, algorithms for automatic
collation of manuscript witnesses, and integrated pipelines for manuscript analysis. This
talk will provide a broad introduction to our work, surveying the motivating questions
behind our research and highlighting the methodological breakthroughs that enable new
forms of computational analysis of such manuscripts. Special attention will be paid to the
published methods and software that can be readily adopted by historians working with
Islamic manuscripts.

Author

• Osama Eshera, University of Maryland