Funding Support

Funding for the project has come from a variety of sources. Initial funding came from the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University who contributed $33,000 between 2007 and 2019 in research funds used to purchase equipment and for travel in support of the project. The College of Arts and Humanities Institute at Indiana University funded a conference, Workshop on Holistic Approaches to the Study of Early Islam and the Late Antique World (April 15-17, 2016) co-organized by Kevin Jaques, Jeremy Schott, and Jason Mokhtarian, that explored many of the issues related to the development of the project.

Funds to support the project were also supplied by the Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book (KITAB) project’s Sīrah initiative that utilized digital methods of text reuse to build the Digital Arabic Reader, which served as the inspiration for the SDR reader. Dr. Jaques also learned mARKdown from Maxim Romanov, then at the University of Vienna, under funding from the KITAB project in the summer of 2018.

Dr. Jaques was also fortunate to receive a Research Fellowship from the Aga Khan University–Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations in the fall of 2019. The digitization of the witness files began during this fellowship as did the initial development of the Targeted Isnād Locator in collaboration with Ryan Muther.

The basic work for the digitization of the Ibrāhīm b. Saʿd witness began in the spring and summer of 2020, under funding from the University College London-Qatar program in the Digital Humanities. Dr. Jaques would especially like to thank Milena Dobreva, director of the Digital Humanities program, for all of her assistance, especially after the onset of the Covid pandemic, which distrupted work at UCL-Q.