OpenITI: a Machine-Readable Corpus of Islamicate Texts

<strong>Co-PIs</strong>: Matthew Thomas Miller (University of Maryland, College Park), Maxim G. Romanov (University of Vienna), Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University—ISMC, London). <em>Open Islamicate Texts Initiative</em> (<strong>OpenITI</strong>) is a multi-institutional effort to construct the first machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. Led by researchers at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC), University of Vienna (UV), Leipzig University (LU), and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (College Park) and an interdisciplinary advisory board of leading digital humanists and Islamic, Persian, and Arabic studies scholars, <strong>OpenITI</strong> aims to provide the essential textual infrastructure in Arabic, Persian and other Islamicate languages for new forms of textual analysis and digital scholarship. In the process, OpenITI will enable new synergies between Digital Humanities and the inter-related Islamicate fields of Islamic, Persian, and Arabic Studies. In addition to support from the researchers’ home institutions, it is supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, awarded to the KITAB project (Grant Agreement No. 772989, PI Sarah Bowen Savant) and the Qatar National Library. Currently, <strong>OpenITI</strong> contains almost exclusively Arabic texts, which were first assembled into a corpus within the <strong>OpenArabic</strong> project, developed first at Tufts University (at <em>The Perseus Project</em>, 2013–2015) and then at Leipzig University (at the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities, 2015–2017)—in both cases with the support and under the patronage of Prof. Gregory Crane. The much more limited number of Persian texts were compiled during 2015–2016 in the Persian Digital Library (PDL) pilot (see Persian Digital Library by PersDigUMD) at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. These texts have not been made fully compatible with OpenITI mARkdown yet and will be made fully available in next releases. <strong>Note on Release Numbering</strong>: Version <strong>2019.1.1</strong>—where <strong>2019</strong> is the year of the release, the first dotted number—<strong>.1</strong>—is the ordinal release number in 2019, and the second dotted number—<strong>.1</strong>—is the overall release number; the first dotted number will reset every year, while the second one will continue on increasing. For more details: https://github.com/OpenITI/RELEASE

**联合首席研究员（Co-PIs）**：马修·托马斯·米勒（马里兰大学帕克分校）、马克西姆·G·罗曼诺夫（维也纳大学）、莎拉·鲍恩·萨万特（伦敦阿迦汗大学伊斯兰文明研究所，AKU-ISMC）。
*开放伊斯兰文本计划（Open Islamicate Texts Initiative，简称OpenITI）* 是一项多机构协作项目，旨在构建首个可机器处理的前现代伊斯兰文明圈文本学术语料库。该项目由阿迦汗大学伊斯兰文明研究所（AKU-ISMC）、维也纳大学（UV）、莱比锡大学（LU）、马里兰大学帕克分校罗斯汉波斯语研究所的研究人员，以及由顶尖数字人文、伊斯兰研究、波斯研究和阿拉伯研究学者组成的跨学科咨询委员会牵头，旨在为阿拉伯语、波斯语及其他伊斯兰文明圈语言提供核心文本基础设施，以支撑新型文本分析与数字学术研究。在此过程中，开放伊斯兰文本计划（OpenITI）将推动数字人文与相互关联的伊斯兰研究、波斯研究、阿拉伯研究等伊斯兰文明圈研究领域之间的新协同。

除各合作机构的支持外，该项目还获得了欧洲研究委员会在欧盟“地平线2020”研究与创新计划下的资助，相关资助授予KITAB项目（资助协议编号：772989，首席研究员莎拉·鲍恩·萨万特），以及卡塔尔国家图书馆的资助。

目前，开放伊斯兰文本计划（OpenITI）的语料几乎全部为阿拉伯语文本。这些文本最初由开放阿拉伯语（OpenArabic）项目整理成册，该项目最初于2013—2015年在塔夫茨大学的珀尔修斯项目（The Perseus Project）中开发，后于2015—2017年在莱比锡大学亚历山大·冯·洪堡数字人文讲席开展，两次开发均得到格雷戈里·克兰教授的支持与赞助。

数量较少的波斯语文本于2015—2016年在马里兰大学罗斯汉波斯语研究所的波斯数字图书馆（PDL）试点项目中汇编完成（详见PersDigUMD推出的波斯数字图书馆）。目前这些文本尚未完全兼容OpenITI mARkdown格式，将在后续版本中全面上线。

**版本编号说明**：版本号格式为*2019.1.1*——其中*2019*为发布年份，第一个小数点后的数字*.1*为2019年度的第几次发布，第二个小数点后的数字*.1*为累计发布编号；年度发布序号每年重置，而累计发布序号则持续递增。更多详情请参阅：https://github.com/OpenITI/RELEASE