Idrisi: An Open Library of Historical Geography of the Premodern Islamic World

FAIN: HAA-296341-24

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Osama Eshera (Project Director: June 2023 to present)
Fateme Savadi (Co Project Director: November 2023 to present)
Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan (Co Project Director: November 2023 to present)

Creation of new datasets containing geographic locations and place names extracted from transcriptions of premodern Islamic texts that will be shared with existing open-source gazetteers and machine learning transcription software that support humanities research.  

The Dabiran Project on the Intellectual History of the Islamic World, based at the University of Maryland, seeks support for creating a new subproject, the Idrisi Digital Library of Historical Geography. Under development since 2018, the Dabiran digital infrastructure supports bibliographic metadata and text-transcriptions for digital scans of premodern Islamic manuscripts. A Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in the amount of $148,591 will allow for the expansion of Dabiran’s database and improve our capacity to record historical-geographical data, drawn directly from manuscripts of Islamic geographical works. This new data will be an indispensable resource for historians seeking to identify placenames and examine differences in their linguistic forms, geographical coordinates, and descriptions across various historical sources. The bibliographic and geographic data compiled will be published and archived on open-source repositories.