The Making of the Arabic Book, Volume 1How Text Reuse Built a World Tradition

Uses digital methods to examine a written traditional holistically and forensically

• Offers the first comprehensive study based on the most extensive corpus of Arabic literature, encompassing over 1 billion words from Arabic texts
• Applies pioneering digital methods to track the reuse of texts from across the Islamic world between roughly 700 and 1500 CE
• Documents how and why authors reused texts, how they explained their practices through their terminology and what these practices reveal about writerly practices and book culture in the period
• Reveals the effects of text recycling on the evolution of the Arabic written tradition as a whole

For most historic Arabic authors, creating new works began with reusing existing ones. They reissued, abbreviated, expanded upon, excerpted and otherwise mined their predecessors’ texts as they created fresh new works. In the process, authors produced an enormously intertextual tradition. To reconstruct these relations, the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) project built a digital corpus of thousands of early Arabic books, written over eight centuries from Iberia to Central and South Asia. The team then utilised a text reuse detection algorithm to create an original dataset that documents near-verbatim relationships among all of these books.

This volume investigates the broad patterns from the dataset and forensically analyses individual writers’ practices to see how their reuse of earlier works made the Arabic tradition. Using the tools, methods and approaches of the digital humanities, it aims to inspire scholars of all world literatures to investigate the origins and growth of written traditions in novel ways.