Papers by Sarah Bowen Savant
EURASIAN Studies , 2018
What can the history of books tell us about Iranian cities and their histories? This article intr... more What can the history of books tell us about Iranian cities and their histories? This article introduces the manuscript of a multi-text compilation (majmūʿa) for the purpose of illustrating its potential usefulness as a source for studying the social and cultural history of Shiraz in the turbulent period that followed the collapse of Mongol rule in the area. We specifically seek to show that Köprülü 01589, now housed in Istanbul, helps us to see how books were produced and consumed, and provides insight into the operations of a busy workshop for copying texts. Despite the rarity and historical significance of several of the pieces that it contains, the availability of images of the manuscript for some time in Istanbul and Iran, and attention to it in catalogues, it has not received scholarly attention as a whole.1 Although this article is only a preliminary study of a single manuscript, we believe it is important for the current volume in showing what manuscripts can reveal of the social world that produced them, the networks of people and ideas that animated city life, and the cultural resources of specific times
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2014
Tradition, Memory, and Conversion, 2013
Tradition, Memory, and Conversion, 2013
History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East, ed. Philip Wood, Apr 4, 2013
Comparative Islamic Studies, Jan 1, 2008
Abstract For many ninth and tenth-century Persian Muslims, Isaac fulfilled a role as the Persians... more Abstract For many ninth and tenth-century Persian Muslims, Isaac fulfilled a role as the Persians' Ishmael. Abraham was their grandfather just as he was the Arabs'. Claims to Isaac as the Persians' father occurred amidst dozens of other attempts in the ninth and tenth ...
conference CfPs by Sarah Bowen Savant
Drafts by Sarah Bowen Savant
This short article for the British Academy Review details work on KITAB -- the Digital Humanities... more This short article for the British Academy Review details work on KITAB -- the Digital Humanities research project that I lead. It will appear in the June issue. The British Academy funded our pilot in 2015.
Papers (Working) by Sarah Bowen Savant
The OpenITI team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University’s (L... more The OpenITI team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University’s (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines (~400 pages, 87,000 words). These accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual accuracy rates of the various proprietary OCR options for classical Arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source OCR software called Kraken (developed by Benjamin Kiessling, LU), thus enabling us to make this Arabic-script OCR technology freely available to the broader Islamic, Persian, and Arabic Studies communities in the near future. Unlike more traditional OCR approaches, Kraken relies on a neural network—which mimics the way we learn—to recognize letters in the images of entire lines of text without trying first to segment lines into words and then words into letters. This segmentation step—a mainstream OCR approach that persistently fails on connected scripts—is thus completely removed from the process, making Kraken uniquely powerful for dealing with a diverse variety of ligatures in connected Arabic script (see section 3.1 for more technical details). In the process we also generated over 7,000 lines of “gold standard” (double-checked) data that can be used by others for Arabic-script OCR training and testing purposes.
Books by Sarah Bowen Savant
By Ibn Qutaybah
Arabic Edition and Translation into English
Edited by James Montgomery and Peter ... more By Ibn Qutaybah
Arabic Edition and Translation into English
Edited by James Montgomery and Peter Webb
Translated by Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb
This edited volume contains 9 papers that discuss the generation of genealogical knowledge, the ... more This edited volume contains 9 papers that discuss the generation of genealogical knowledge, the empowerment of political and religious elites, and genealogy as a source for writing history.
This is the introduction to Ibn Qutaybah's Excellence of the Arabs. For the full book, see: http... more This is the introduction to Ibn Qutaybah's Excellence of the Arabs. For the full book, see: https://nyupress.org/books/9781479809578/
Book Reviews by Sarah Bowen Savant
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2018
Website by Sarah Bowen Savant
This is my first blog for the website of our KITAB project (Knowledge, Information Technology, an... more This is my first blog for the website of our KITAB project (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book). KITAB uses digital methods to study the formation and development of the Arabic textual tradition. The blog concerns specifically variations in "versions" of the the Muwaṭṭaʾ (“the well-trodden path”) of Imam Mālik b. Anas (d. 796), which is a founding book for Islamic law and Prophetic tradition (Hadith).
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Papers by Sarah Bowen Savant
conference CfPs by Sarah Bowen Savant
Drafts by Sarah Bowen Savant
Papers (Working) by Sarah Bowen Savant
Books by Sarah Bowen Savant
Arabic Edition and Translation into English
Edited by James Montgomery and Peter Webb
Translated by Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb
Book Reviews by Sarah Bowen Savant
Website by Sarah Bowen Savant
Arabic Edition and Translation into English
Edited by James Montgomery and Peter Webb
Translated by Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb