Maxim Romanov, PhD

Maxim Romanov is a Universitätsassistent für Digital Humanities at the Institute for History, University of Vienna. His dissertation (Near Eastern Studies, U of Michigan, 2013) explored how modern computational techniques of text analysis can be applied to the study of premodern Arabic historical sources. In particular, he studied “The History of Islam” (Taʾrīḫ al-islām), the largest of surviving biographical collections with over 30,000 biographies, written by the Damascene scholar al-Ḏahabī (d. 1348 CE). Currently, he continues his study of this biographical collection (“The History of Islam”: An Essay in Digital Humanities), which will serve as methodological and infrastructural foundation for the study of all surviving Arabic biographical collections and chronicles. Additionally, he is working on a series of foundational projects for the field of Arabic and Islamic studies, which include 1) a machine-readable corpus of classical Arabic texts (OpenITI, https://openiti.github.io/), 2) a text-reuse project (KITAB, http://kitab-project.org/), and 3) a gazetteer and a geographical model of the classical Islamic world (al-Ṯurayyā, https://althurayya.github.io/).