Tarikh As-Sudan
December 2022
A network analysis of scholarly epithets
Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Abd Allah Sadi’s Tarikh As-Sudan is an important Arabic history of West Africa. Written in the 1650s in Timbuktu it serves, along with Tarikh Al-Fattash, as the core primary source for the history of the Songhai Empire. Section in the middle of the work, spanning multiple chapters, is dedicated to describing the scholars of Timbuktu and Djenne. This project consisted of two parts. The first was the production of an aligned, open-source English translation of the 9th chapter of the chroncle. The second was network analysis of the descriptors Sadi applies to the scholars he describes across the 6th, 9th, and 10th chapters.
My raw files, code, and a brief write-up can all be found here.
Topics
- Digital Humanities
- Networks
- Lemmatization
- Translation Alignment
Technologies Used
- NetworkX
- Pandas
- DeepL
- TEI Markdown
Challenges & Learnings
This was my first experience with both translation alignment and TEI markdown. It was also the first time I’d tried to use machine translation at scale for a scholarly excercise.