22 May 2025
10:00–11:30
The Quran, beyond being a holy text and the exemplar of Classical Arabic, is also a rich corpus resource for teaching Arabic Digital Humanities (DH) at the undergraduate level. This presentation explores how treating the Quran as textual data allows students to engage in systematic corpus analysis using tools such as Voyant and AntConc. By conducting hands-on projects, students enhance their analytical skills while investigating thematic and conceptual representations in the Quran—such as depictions of heaven and hell, women, and prophets—or linguistic structures such as cognitive verbs and imperatives. Through features like keyword searches, collocation analysis, and frequency distributions, students uncover textual patterns, intertextual relationships, and discourse structures that can only be identified by distant reading the Quran. This approach not only introduces students to foundational corpus analysis skills but also cultivates their critical thinking and digital literacy in the humanities. In addition to showcasing successful classroom applications, this presentation will provide attendees (faculty and librarians and anyone interested in DH) with practical takeaways, including sample assignments, recommended tools, and strategies for integrating corpus-based analysis into Arabic or DH curricula.