kalimat is the first online handbook of Arabic literature from the pre-modern and early modern periods, published in Arabic and English alike.

The new publication format promotes Arabic and English as the two languages of academic research and learning in the field. All articles are published in both languages, just as the platform is bilingual in all its functionalities.

Editorial workflows, the editing and incremental publication of the articles are all facilitated by the open source software Open Encyclopedia System (OES), engineered by the project partner FUB-IT at Freie Universität Berlin, directed by Brigitte Grote. The entire platform is published in open access.

kalimat consists of short articles that translate Arabic literary concepts into modern usage, then analyse and contextualise them in specified corpora. The main goal is to emphasise the complexity and multi-layered semantic nature of literature as a meta-concept, and to account for the polysemy and mutability of the rich repertoire of Arabic literary concepts.

The terms and concepts in our living handbook bring together research in philology, literary and intellectual history and cultural studies. They are drawn from the fields of literary genres and institutions, literary theory including poetics, rhetoric and linguistics, literary ethics (adab), and textual practices.

The kalimat project and editorial team at Freie Universität Berlin, under the academic lead of Johannes Stephan, host a pilot project in Arabic Digital Humanities: to facilitate access to the latest academic research in the field, to promote young academics and their contributions, and to open the floor for new readings of literary concepts in the Arabic tradition.

Team

Advisory board