KALiMaT is the first online handbook of Arabic literature from the pre-modern and early modern periods. The new publication format promotes Arabic and English as the two languages of academic research and learning in the field.  KALiMaT consists of short articles that translate Arabic literary concepts into modern usage, as well as analyze and contextualize them in specified corpora. The main goal of KALiMaT is to emphasize the complexity and multi-layered semantic nature of literature as a meta-concept. Another goal is to account for the polysemy and mutability of the rich repertoire of Arabic literary concepts. The terms and concepts to be included in our living handbook will bring together research in philology and literary and intellectual history as well as cultural studies and are drawn from the fields of literary genres and institutions, literary theory including poetics, rhetoric, and linguistics, literary ethics (adab), as well as textual practices. All articles are to be published in both Arabic and English.

The editorial workflows, the editing and incremental publication of the bilingual articles are facilitated by the open source software Open Encyclopedia System (OES) provided by the project partner FUB-IT at the Freie Universität Berlin. OES will be enhanced to account for Arabic and English articles and to enable community activities. The content is published open access, OES as open source software.

Project Duration

01.10.2024 - 30.09.2027 

Funding

German Research Foundation (DFG), LIS (GEPRIS entry)

Project Team 

Beatrice Gründler (Principal Investigator)

Brigitte Grote (Co-Investigator, FUB-IT)

Johannes Stephan (academic director, editor-in-chief)

Oualid El Khattabi (managing editor)

Joudy Sido Bozan (software development, FUB-IT)

Contact (OES): info@open-encyclopedia-system.org