Open Islamicate Texts Initiative
(OpenITI)

About OpenITI

The written heritage of the “Islamicate” cultures that stretch from modern Bengal to Spain is as vast as it is understudied and underrepresented in the digital humanities. The sheer volume and diversity of the surviving works produced in Persian and Arabic by denizens of these lands in the premodern period makes this body of texts ideal for computational forms of analysis. Efforts to utilize these new digital forms of analysis, however, have been stymied by the lack of a reliable corpus.

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) 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 (AKU), Universität Leipzig (UL), 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, OpenITI aims to provide the essential textual infrastructure in Persian and Arabic for new forms of macro 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.

OpenITI Team

Co-Principal Investigators

Sarah Bowen Savant	Maxim Romanov	Matthew Thomas Miller
Associate Professor @ Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London (kitab-project.org)	Research Fellow @ Alexander von Humboldt-Lehrstuhl für Digital Humanities, Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig	Roshan Institute Research Fellow @ Roshan Institute for Persian Studies Associate Director, Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD), University of Maryland, College Park

Senior Advisors

Bridget Almas	Gregory Crane	Neil Fraistat
Senior Software Developer & Architect, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University	Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt-Lehrstuhl für Digital Humanities Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig and Professor of Classics, Tufts University	Professor of English and Director, Maryland Institute for Technology (MITH), University of Maryland, College Park
Ahmet T. Karamustafa	Fatemeh Keshavarz	Verena Klemm
Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park	Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Studies and Director, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland, College Park	Professor of Near Eastern History and Culture, Universität Leipzig

External Advisory Board

Christopher W. Blackwell	Jamal J. Elias	Sunil Sharma	Olga Davidson
Louis G. Forgione University Professor of Classics, Furman University	Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania	Professor of Persian and Indian Literatures, Boston University	Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations, Boston University
Fred Donner	Beatrice Gründler	Konrad Hirschler	Matthew Jockers
Professor of Near Eastern History, University of Chicago	Professor, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin	Professor of Middle Eastern History, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London	Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Hugh Kennedy	Emad Khazraee	Paul E. Losensky	Laura Mandell
Professor of Arabic, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London	Assistant Professor, School of Library & Information Science, Kent State University	Professor of Central Eurasian Studies and Comparative Literature, Indiana University (Bloomington)	Professor of English and Director, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A&M University
Intisar A. Rabb	Chase Robinson	Sabine Schmidtke
Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School	President and Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York	Professor of Islamic Intellectual History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton