Dear colleagues,

The team of the ERC project “The Early Islamic Empire at Work” based at Hamburg are 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 at https://www.islamic-empire.uni-hamburg.de/en/publications-tools/publications.... 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.

Jedli is a toolbox that currently contains three distinct search functions: the indexer, the highlighter, and the context search. The indexer enables you to produce a custom index of any word in a text (or any number of words in any number of texts at the same time), complete with references to the specific volume and page number of each occurrence, and a user-defined amount of context around the search word. The highlighter marks any number of search terms in different colors according to a user-defined color scheme, to help you identify relevant text segments more quickly. The context search allows you to restrict search results to contexts pertinent to your research through the combination of customized (lists of) search terms.

The current version of Jedli can now be downloaded for free from our website at https://www.islamic-empire.uni-hamburg.de/en/publications-tools/digital-tool.... We also provide a directory containing a collection of digitized Arabic texts that we have already converted into the format required for Jedli to work (.txt).

The current version only runs on Windows platforms, but we are working to ensure that it will run on other operating systems in the near future as well. If you encounter any bugs or problems during the execution of the program, or have requests for additional features, please let us know by e-mailing us at joseharoperalta@gmail.com and/or peter.verkinderen@uni-hamburg.de.

With best wishes from Hamburg, Hannah Hagemann

Dr. Hannah-Lena Hagemann Research Associate, ERC Project "The Early Islamic Empire at Work - The View From the Regions Toward the Center" Universität Hamburg, Asien-Afrika-Institut Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Rm 16 20146 Hamburg, Germany T: +49 40 42838 3095 E: hannah-lena.hagemann@uni-hamburg.de W: https://www.islamic-empire.uni-hamburg.de/