During a two-day workshop Digital Humanities at Utrecht University on 31 November and 1 December 2017, Maxim Romanov introduced a set of tools and methods for computational analysis and distant reading of Arabic texts. The participants were introduced to the use of regular expressions in working with digital texts, to the OpenITI project, OpenITI mARkdown and, briefly, to stylometric analysis in digital humanities.
As one of the most elementary programming techniques, and perhaps the most practical, regular expressions can be used to search through large texts according to a wide range of criteria. During the workshop, next to learning these techniques, utilising them in relation to Arabic and Persian texts was also explained and practised. Furthermore, presenting the OpenITI project (an initiative to create and develop a digital corpus of premodern Arabic and Persian texts), Maxim Romanov familiarised the participants with tagging (mARkdown), which makes the digital texts fully accessible for computational analysis. Finally, showcasing a number of stylometric sample analyses, the extent to which these methods can be useful for scholarly works in Islamic and Arabic studies in general, and in SENSIS project in particular, were discussed.