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Digital Humanities and the Intellectual History of al-Andalus
A talk by
Covadonga Baratech
(Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East (ILC - CSIC))
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What was the life expectancy of Andalusi scholars? What were the ten most common activities Andalusi scholars were involved in? In which century do we have the largest number of scholarly families? Where were they located? To which places did Andalusi scholars travel the most? A couple of decades ago, answering these questions would have taken weeks, even months to answer. However, thanks to databases like Prosopografía de Ulemas de al-Andalus (PUA) and programming languages like R, they are just a couple of lines of code away.
For this talk Covadonga Baratech provides an introduction toÌý ÌýProsopografía de Ulemas de al-Andalus, the main database for scholars of Muslim Iberia.She will discuss its strengths as well as some areas for improvement and share some of the results obtained when combined with a programming language such as R. The goal is to encourage people to explore the possibilities of these tools and apply new methodologies in their research.
She also invites Ìýpeople to think about data in new ways. How representative is the data we work with? Does it apply to most of the population? For example, analyzing PUA’s data we discover that the life expectancy of Andalusi scholars was 70,93 lunar years. However, we only know the life span of 1998 people or 17% of the dataset. Can we apply these findings to the rest of the scholars in the database? And what about the non-scholars of al-Andalus? What strategies can we use to make this data more fiable?
This talk will be of interest to scholars of Middle East and Islamic Studies, medievalists, historians of all places and periods, and any Humanities and Social Sciences Scholars interested in working with digital databases.
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is a PhD student at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean (CSIC). She is a member of the research project directed by M. Penelas and M. Fierro dealing with the migration of Andalusi and Maghribi scholars to other regions of the Islamic world (8th-15th centuries) and their intellectual and religious impact (PID2020-116680GB-I00). Her research focuses on the times of Saladin and the Ayyubids (1171-1260). She aims to study the intellectual exchanges between the Andalusi and Maghribi scholars and their Mashriqi colleagues. In particular, she intends to comprehend the spread of knowledge produced in the Maghrib into de Mashriq. Her main work areas are intellectual history, manuscript tradition and digital humanities.
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Wednesday, 19 March •Ìýnoon
230
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Open to faculty, students, staff and members of the community
Please register in advance