Methodological Elements: Statistics and Digital Humanities. What Research Perspectives for the Early History of Islam?

Abstract: The development of digital humanities has opened new perspectives in the history of Islam: whether dealing with thin or sometimes vast source corpora (such as S=ira, al-Tbar=i, al-Dahab=i, etc.), these tools allow us to approach texts much more effectively from a statistical perspective, in order to support more general hypotheses and move beyond case studies. Drawing on the work of a number of researchers as well as our own, we propose to study the potentialities and limitations posed by computer methods for the history of medieval Islam, keeping in mind that the conclusions may prove useful to researchers of other periods. We will particularly emphasize two tools: the construction and use of relational databases, and more recently, the tagging of sources, with the stated goal of addressing some of the problems posed by the previous method.