Kātibī: Digital Manuscript Annotation and Transcription Environment

The Kātibī project provides tools for digitally cataloguing and transcribing scientific and philosophical manuscripts. To the extent possible, the complex nature of scientific and philosophical traditions of premodern Islamic world were taken into consideration when designing and implementing the Kātibī tools. Through complex database queries that retrieve codicological data directly from manuscripts of scientific and philosophical works, these tools help intellectual historians restore forgotten and often intertwined networks of texts and the people who produced, taught or studied them. The codicological data are retrieved from all kinds of codicological elements in a codex, such as stamps, ownership notes, study notes, licences, colophons, marginalia, glosses etc. Kātibī also provides tools for digitally transcribing and tokenizing the content of scientific and philosophical manuscripts. The transcribed and tokenized text are used for a wide variety of research purposes.