The Empirical Humanist

A pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words. So a con­crete exam­ple that you can not only see, but also play with, is worth ten thou­sand words.

The Quranic Ara­bic Cor­pus incor­po­rates much of my vision for the study of the Bible in the third mil­len­nium of our civ­i­liza­tion. For “under the hood” details, see the descrip­tion of the research of Kais Dukes, who is — of all things! — a VP of Mer­rill Lynch.

Three ele­ments of this projects are mor­pho­log­i­cal anno­ta­tion, a syn­tax tree­bank and a seman­tic ontol­ogy. All three are com­bined into a web user inter­face in such a way that col­lab­o­ra­tion is pos­si­ble. The gen­eral pub­lic inter­ested in the Quran itself can browse the orig­i­nal Ara­bic text, and dive into mor­phol­ogy, syn­tax and seman­tics as desired. Schol­ars can work on the actual analy­sis sim­ply by log­ging in.

This model of lin­guis­tic anno­ta­tion of a cor­pus can eas­ily be extended to include bib­li­og­ra­phy, web resources, archae­o­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal data — the pos­si­bil­i­ties are endless.

One exten­sion ought to be the abil­ity to add user anno­ta­tion which is stored locally on the user/visitor’s own com­puter but which inte­grates seam­lessly with the website.

I noticed one fea­ture that is lack­ing: the abil­ity for com­plex search­ing, using the mor­phol­ogy, syn­tax and seman­tic anno­ta­tions. There is a search box for sim­ple text queries, but a more sophis­ti­cated search engine would greatly enhance the value of this remark­able resource.