The team of the ERC project “The Early Islamic Empire at Work” is very pleased to announce the publication of the second issue of the Early Islamic Empire Working Paper Series. “Jedli: A Textual Analysis Toolbox for Digitized Arabic Texts” by José Haro Peralta and Peter Verkinderen is now available for download [ here ]. The working paper contains a detailed manual of how to use Jedli, a toolbox developed by the two authors to help scholars make use of digitized Arabic texts more quickly and efficiently.

Scholars working with Arabic texts are often confronted with an extraordinary number of sources at their disposal. Manually researching these texts can take an inordinate amount of time. Although many of the primary sources in Arabic have been available in digital form for some time now, the potential inherent in this development has not been fully realized yet. Inspired by the advent of digital humanities, the project team have started developing a number of tools for text mining and data analysis that more fully take advantage of the digitization of Arabic sources.

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