Methodological Elements: Statistics and Digital Humanities. What Research Perspectives for the Early History of Islam?

TL;DR

This paper explores how digital humanities tools, especially relational databases and source tagging, can enhance the statistical analysis of early Islamic history, offering new research perspectives and addressing methodological challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic evaluation of computer methods in medieval Islamic history, emphasizing relational databases and source tagging as innovative approaches.

Findings

Digital tools improve text analysis efficiency.

Relational databases facilitate complex historical queries.

Source tagging addresses limitations of earlier methods.

Abstract

The development of digital humanities has opened new perspectives in the history of Islam: whether dealing with thin or sometimes vast source corpora (such as S\=ira, al-Tbar\=i, al-Dahab\=i, etc.), these tools allow us to approach texts much more effectively from a statistical perspective, in order to support more general hypotheses and move beyond case studies. Drawing on the work of a number of researchers as well as our own, we propose to study the potentialities and limitations posed by computer methods for the history of medieval Islam, keeping in mind that the conclusions may prove useful to researchers of other periods. We will particularly emphasize two tools: the construction and use of relational databases, and more recently, the tagging of sources, with the stated goal of addressing some of the problems posed by the previous method.