["Pomp and Circumstance"]
Hello and welcome to the online lecture series, Recent and Ongoing Research Projects in Islamic
Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute, Hamburg University. Today, we're proud to present Maxime
Romana. He will present us here's DfG Aminota Group, The Evolution of Islamic Society's
Algorithmic Analysis into Social History. Thank you very much to all of you for coming.
It's quite exciting for me to present my project. I think it's been long in making and now I
have this amazing opportunity to actually implement it through the grant that I received
from DfG within the Aminota program. So the name of the project is Evolution of Islamic Societies,
proposed chronology for it is from 600 to 1600. So kind of the first millennium of the Islamic
history and the subtitle is Algorithmic Analysis into Social History, which hints very strongly
toward the use of computational methods in the project. So as I already mentioned, it's funded
through the Aminota program and I've essentially just started just a few months into the project
and the team is still in the, hasn't been assembled and I'm going through the final
preparations to actually to start the project full speed. So why? Let me just quickly introduce
you the main premises and the whys and hows of the project. So why is this project? So the Arabic
tradition is, written tradition is vast and understudied. If we look at different numbers,
we have a really, really vast amount of sources that we can, we have to study. So if I did
that, if he in the bibliograph from early 20th century gives us 40,000 titles and roughly the
same amount you'll find in in Brackelmann's Geshif Dharat, Geshif Dharat, Geshif Dharat,
as well. The recent website in Iran now lists over 1 million manuscripts. So we have a really
staggering amount of data. We should work, we have to work as historians and researchers of
the cause of Middle East. We don't know how many of, how much of this has been actually published,
but Open ATI corpus, the Open ATI corpus at the moment has about 6400 unique titles in it,
which amounts to over 1 billion tokens. It's a very, very large corpus. Historical and
biographical texts, such as chronicles and biographical collections, run into hundreds
in this corpus. Well, actually, probably in low hundreds. There are about 300 texts
that are digitizing available in the Open ATI, which amounts to roughly 100 million words.
And that would go up to some 500,000 biographical records. So this is a huge amount of historical
and biographical information that we can work with. And as we, as there are so many publications
that deal and reconstruct, deal with and reconstruct a large variety of different
social historical processes from the sources, we know that the potential of the sources
is absolutely amazing, is almost limitless. And we do have potential information to produce a
robust model of the development of the Islamic world from the sources. So far, unfortunately,
as what Adalcadi put it, it was, it has been our blessing and our curse. We have so much information
that we've effectively drowned in it. And it's really difficult to work with it with traditional
methods. So my project offer is this methodological solution to this. It brings a combination of
corpus, constantly growing machine readable corpus of historical text, which is the Open
ATI. I can talk in more details about that, about the corpus, and a series of computational methods,
which vary from natural language processing, text to use, identification methods, keyword
extraction, different clustering methods, and to geographical information systems and machine
learning. And bringing this combination into a robust and dynamic data driven model, based on
exhaustive evidence from available resources. And through that, to allow us to have unique
perspectives on both in history and historiography. So the chronology and geography of the project,
how far, how far it will go. So in both cases, the project is corpus driven and exploratory.
What does it mean? So, for example, primarily, I'm interested in using all available biographical
texts that we have already in the corpus. And ideally, the plan is to construct the project
in such a way that newly digitized sources, it would be possible to bring them in automatically
into this model that the project will be building. And kind of allow it to expand and grow
as sources become available. This graph here shows you how the current, how the biographical texts
distributed in the open ITI corpus. And you can see that most of them come
from the Abbasid period and from the Mambut period. The 500, some 500,000 biographical
records are distributed in the following manner. And you can hear, you can see that lots and lots
of them come from the Mambut period. And of course, authors like Adahabiya Sahawi are
responsible for this amount of data. Geography is also will be covered in this exploratory manner.
And this map here shows you the extent of the early Islamic world as it's covered in the
core news atlas and from from rather recently in the Athariah project that's
I've been developing together with Masoomi. Hi, Masoomi, I see you there.
She's been very important in the development of this project. And here you can see the extent of
the Islamic world from as it can be constructed from geographical classical geographical works.
And the next slide shows you the extent of of data that can be mapped from a specific source
So these are roughly the extent of the geographical extent that will be covered in the project.
Of course, each source will offer insights more likely in this particular groups, social,
religious or particular regions. But overall, I hope to achieve some kind of balance with exclusion
as many sources as possible. Approach, what kind of approach will be will be applied in the project.
So the main focus of the project is on what I call minimal units of information.
So in other words, it's descriptions of events from chronicles or biographical records from
from biographical collections. And the premise here is that while narratives are consciously
constructed and controlled by the authors, the the myriad of these details scattered across this
vast texts. And I mean, many texts that we have in the corpus are the largest is nine million words
tokens. The second to largest are just about three million tokens. So we're talking about
huge, huge sources which are needed from this from this details, and they simply cannot be
subjected to the same agenda driven editing. And in large quantities, I expected such agenda driven
data is likely to provide the more reliable historical evidence. So these minimal units of
information will be aggregated into clusters of related historical information, and which will be
studied by the members of the project, both internal and external to in practical terms,
terms, each primary source will be broken down into into such units, and then they will be
re aggregated into what I what I call here master chronicle, which will will serve as a unified
research ecosystem for the project and its collaborators. I will continue to to other
things, but I'm I will return to master chronicle maybe in the q&a session if you have more details.
So research methods. Then of the project, there will be specifically three large groups of research
methods. First group will include a variety of text mining methods that will allow us to generate
metadata layers for this minimal units of informations that will allow to actually cluster
them efficiently in some meaningful ways. Second group will include modeling and analysis of this
extracted information. And the third group will be more traditional close reading approaches to
what will be identified as important pieces of information, important clusters of informations
through the first two groups of methods. The team will will include me as a PI, a postdoc
with the computer science and developer developer skills. Two PhD students
adds finally went online and available at this links. So if you're interested, if you know someone
who would be qualified to be interested in the project, please urge them to to apply or
write to me if they have any questions and also student assistance.
The project will include three large research areas and my research area will focus on social
structure and mobility and more specifically on the analysis of biographical dictionaries first
and foremost. So and we'll pursue such broad questions as compositions of Islamic society
or elites better. Of course, we're talking about more elites and presented in this dictionary
rather than society broadly. Specifically, this will build on research already done on based on
the analysis of Nisbus and other descriptors from biographies that allow us to identify
different social and professional and religious groups and trace their geographies and their
chronologies. This area will also focus on major social transformations. Again, we can model a lot
of different processes from this biographical information like institutionalization,
professionalization, to what extent the society was tribal and stopped being a tribal and kind
of maybe acquired some different properties. And of course, biographical data gives us a lot of a
lot of information for studying cultural geography of the Islamic world and mobility patterns.
And some of you might have already seen it from my other presentations of how
this can be traced and how it can be studied. The research areas of the PhD student will include
political power and conflict and environmental change and disasters. In the first case,
the main goal, the main interest is to trace the extent of political control as this can be
gathered from chronicles, primarily chronicles, and look into patterns of interaction with local
populations on from the side of the sort of political dynastic elites.
And the second area would be environmental change and disasters,
so tracing things like climate change, plagues, floods, floods, and other
complexities that could have affected society's local populations in a variety of ways.
And the goal in general would be to bring this kind of a unified project, which will start from
machine-readable corpus verbiage text, move to extracted and modeled historical information
that would be merged into this master chronicle,
and three research areas then to be brought into the synthesis
of the evolution of Islamic societies. So the project also will include the Mercatif
Fellow. Maribel Fiera will be Mercatif Fellow on the project.
Okay, so broad objectives, with all that what I've described, the project also pursues
three major broad objectives. One of the primary, the main, the primary one is historical and
biographical. This is again the historical development of the Islamic world, but it
comes and goes with hand in hand with the secondary objective, which is historiographical,
which aims at understanding the historiographical tradition, how texts were written,
to what extent the information was manipulated and filtered and edited by its authors, or maybe
vice versa, preserved, as unchanged as it possibly can be. And the other broad objective
is methodological, educational, and this one in particular includes the development of
resources that could be used after the project by scholars in the field and students, includes
teaching and instruction, and overall kind of build the field of digital Islamic history
around kind of around this project, around the corpus, and around the master chronicle.
In particular, the project will include a call for external collaborators who will be invited to
participate in a summer institute, learn some digital techniques and methods, and will then
have a chance to come to the project and work with us closely with us for about a month in order to
work on a specific research question that they have that can be answered through all these
sources brought together into master chronicle. The collaboration on the project will include
a number of prominent arabists, as you can see here on the list, and methodologically,
it will include Nizar Habash and his team. Nizar Habash is a leading expert in Arabic NLP and
corpus linguistics at NYU Abu Dhabi, and another person also kind of from the methodological side
is Peter Tuqin, who is currently working on mathematical modeling of social historical
processes. So that will be the kind of the extent of collaboration, and we hope to bring in new other
people as well. I kind of rushed through my presentation much faster than I expected, so
we can either jump into Q&A section right now, or I can actually give a few more details on the
methodological approach that will help to understand how the work will be done.
Thomas, is that okay?
Yes, please continue. Okay, so the master chronicle, just to kind of let me show this
visual presentation of how it would work. So each source, again as a state, will be broken down
into units of information in such a way that a unit would have some chronological and
geographical markers that would allow to reassemble them together in many ways, in a very
similar manner, how the Arab authors, Muslim authors were doing it themselves. They would
take in information from other sources and stitching them together in their own books,
editing those pieces or not editing them. And we can organize this information into this kind of
new network, which would allow us to do then different kinds of readings of this information,
and then we'll be able to do chronological reading or geochronological reading
of let's say focus on a specific area and read all the events, all the biographies that are
associated with that place. We can do thematic reading focusing only on specific thematic
aspects and jumping across this master chronicle. Or we can do histographical reading where we can
read the representation of particular biographies or particular events
across the histographical tradition. So that effectively would be the platform
that will allow scholars, first of all, the members of the project,
to do our research and to collaborate to sort of the benefit from this approach.
At the core of a methodological approach was my own
methodological approach, which I called algorithmic analysis. And again, to give a glimpse into how
it works, we can look at a particular source and look at what kind of information can be
extracted from it. And this is a rather simple approach. I mean, as it is described right here,
in a sense that it focuses on Nisbus, places, dates, and book titles, although
titles probably would not be covered here. We're talking about the approach that is
recurring, repetitive in a sense that we go in from a corpus to abstractions, to digital analysis,
to some kind of humanistic assessment. And we go back and forth trying to
improve this process. And that's how in general is the digital approaches of working.
So let's give a quick example of this text mining technique. So here's a very simple biography,
not very informative in terms of foreclosed reading, but actually quite informative in terms of
distant reading. So here we have information, we have the name, we have Nisbus, we have dates,
we have the toponyms, we have book titles. So this biography on its own doesn't care much
information, but if it's extracted, abstracted in a particular manner, like for example shown here,
again, dates, toponyms, Nisbus descriptive names. And when we have hundreds, thousands of such
biographies, we can aggregate this information in order to explore large scale processes,
which would allow us to, for instance, trace the simple chronologies in terms of how many
people would have specific places in specific periods of time. We can look into how different
regions are represented in a variety of ways. So here's, for example, the number of people who
one way or another associated with these different regions covered in Hadid Latifin,
and you can see that different regions are represented differently. We can also look at
this information chronological perspective, and we can see from here that different regions
are represented differently. So Iraq and Iran are very prominent in the beginning,
Egypt and Syria more sort of in the middle period, and Anatolia, Rome becomes very prominent at the
end. We can also aggregate this information into networks, which would allow us to again construct
the networks of individuals with a particular specific shared characteristics as well as a
general grant network. So here's, this would be an example of a connection of a network of that
individual who was presented in the biography that I showed. So he was born in Bashan, lived in
Nishapur and died in Mecca, and these are possible routes how he might have traveled.
But for different reasons, we can, for a variety of reasons, we can simplify this
and represent it only as a single connection between Khorasan and Arabia. And this kind of
simple networks can be then aggregated in order to assess long periods of time, again,
or different social groups. Here I'll just show the interregional connections for the,
for particular stretches of time. And here you can see that there's connections between what
Iraq and Iranian provinces and later periods of this interregional connection shift and show us
very different pattern. Later on, when we move to the Mamluk period, we can see the
interregional connections very strong in the course of in the Mamluk core, and later on,
the shift towards the Ottoman Empire, and this and this split into Turkey,
African in the Iranian courts in the 18th century onwards. So I guess I'll stop here,
and I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.