About this website

This website documents the activities and progress of our project, which undertakes an innovative study of the development of the Islamic world through the computational analysis of Arabic chronicles and biographical collections, which—for the first time—are treated holistically as a unified corpus of historical information (c. 300 titles; 100 million words; c. 400,000 biographical records). The project is generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Emmy Noether Program (Project #445975300) and is hosted at the Institute of Africa and Asia of the University of Hamburg. The acronym of the project, EIS1600, is idiosyncratically pronounced as “ice-sixteen-hundred”.

The website’s structure is pragmatically simple and minimalistic. On the left side, you will find a short menu with the following options (if you access this website from your smartphone, the menu will be hiding under the button in the top right corner):

• “Latest” is the link to the main page, where all information is aggregated in reverse chronological order.

• “Contents” will take you to the page where you can browse blogposts by their categories and tags. Categories are as follows (all will gradually appear): • Team • Sources • Methods • Concepts • Findings • Experiments • Workflows • Events. As you may expect, “tags” provide more specific keyword descriptions to each blogpost. Using the combination of both will help you find anything on our website. This functionality (plus, full-text search) will be also available on the main page (“Latest”), if you access our website from your computer or tablet. If you access from your smartphone, these options will be unavailable because of the limits of the smartphone screen size.

• “Lab” contains links to a series of experimental tools and resources which are either developed within our project or closely associated with it. Usually, you will be able to find a detailed blogpost on each of the mentioned resources through “Contents”.

• “About” is the page with the general information about the website.

• “Search” will allow you to search our website. Just type in any word that you are looking for.

Our team works together to provide the same content in five different languages: English, German (Lisa Mischer), Russian (Maxim Romanov), Arabic (Tariq Yousef; Rida Yusuf Mustafa Ali), and Persian (Hamid Reza Hakimi). We work hard to ensure that the content of our website is identical in all languages.

Research Group

• Alicia Gonzalez Martinez, CS PostDoc Researcher
• Hamid Reza Hakimi, PhD Researcher
• Lisa Mischer, PhD Researcher
• Maxim Romanov, PI

Former affiliates

• Tariq Yousef, CS Researcher (until September 15, 2023); Tariq took a position of Assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

Important Links

Below you can find links to our funder, host, and closely affiliated projects.