TIMAV Digital Humanities Center

Making the knowledge of tradition computable

T-Corpus produces open data, open tools and open methods for Islamic studies and Turkey-centered humanities — a pipeline running from classical texts to interactive atlases, structured datasets and AI-assisted research instruments.

2platforms in production
20+digital projects
9research lines
3languages: TR · EN · AR
About

World-class digital humanities under a foundation's roof

T-Corpus is a digital humanities center established within the Türkiye İmam Hatipliler Foundation (TIMAV). It aims to be the first center in Turkey producing open, reusable and versioned research data for Islamic studies.

Why T-Corpus?

Turkey's major digital platforms offer search interfaces — but no Islamic studies corpus with downloadable datasets, an API, DOI-versioned releases and an open license yet exists. T-Corpus was founded to fill that gap.

The three-layer principle

The shared secret of international exemplars (OpenITI, KITAB, CLARIN) is a three-layer stack: structured data, rich discovery interfaces, and open tools. Every T-Corpus project builds all three together.

The TIMAV legacy

Active in education since 1994, TIMAV brings 13 workshop reports, 25 books and three decades of institutional experience as the ground of the center's research agenda.

Flagships

Platforms in production

Interactive Historical Atlas

Atlas of Islamic History

An interactive atlas spanning 632–1924, joining Bosworth's dynasty catalogue with digitized layers from more than a dozen classical sources. Map, timeline, causality network and scholar biographies; trilingual interface, offline-capable PWA. Zenodo DOI, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

186dynasties
830rulers
13,940al-Aʿlām biographies
12,954Yāqūt place records
islamicatlas.org →
Historiography Database

ITA — Atlas of Islamic Historiography

A single database joining the historians, works and teacher–student chains of 13 civilizational basins across the 1st–15th centuries AH. The digital form of the "History and Historiography in Civilizational Basins" project — 100+ authors, 11 partner institutions.

2,179historians
2,770works
3,356relations
13basins
Open the atlas →
Projects

The digital project family

Every project carries its honest status: Live Beta In development. Unfinished work is never presented as finished.

BetaTafsīr history

Tafsīr Atlas

An atlas of Qurʾānic exegesis built on the OpenITI corpus: the tafsīr tradition mapped by century, language, school and method.

BetaṬabaqāt

Tabakat

A digital atlas of Muslim scholars: biographical records visualized across space and time through the generational (ṭabaqa) system.

BetaSīra

Sīra Atlas

An interactive digital atlas of the Prophetic era: events, places and figures on a unified space–time axis.

BetaCrusades

Salibiyyāt

The Crusades through the eyes of six Muslim sources: 790 events, 24 fortresses, 1096–1438.

BetaSufism

Digital Sufism Atlas

An interactive atlas of classical Sufi texts (858–1274): geographic map, concept dashboard and text explorer.

LiveDataset

Ridda Wars Database

A structured record of 138 tribal reincorporation events (11–12 AH / 632–633 CE) extracted from three classical Arabic chronicles. Open, reusable data.

138 events · 3 source chronicles
In developmentCorpus

Ibn Taymiyya Corpus

Computational stance mapping across 124+ OpenITI works: a structured corpus of 5,426 fatwas with its analysis pipeline.

5,426 fatwas · 132 works
BetaMedieval Mediterranean

Frontier Heritage Corpus

A study of frontier heritage across multilingual medieval Mediterranean chronicles — Arabic, Latin and Greek.

BetaBook history

The Book in Islam

An interactive adaptation of Pedersen's classic: book production, scribal culture and library tradition in the Islamic world.

LiveQurʾānic Arabic

Ustaz

A "meaning-first" application for learning Qurʾānic Arabic: interlinear analysis and staged vocabulary.

BetaReading circle

Halka

A history-of-science reading circle platform: term-based book programs, session archive and discussion records.

LiveData literacy

The Language of Data

Six interactive data-literacy modules for high-school students — from al-Bīrūnī's calculator to modern visualization.

Data & Tools

A permanent resource catalogue

Projects end; data lives on. Every record in this catalogue is versioned, licensed and maintained independently of its project.

Atlas of Islamic History data layers

13,940 al-Aʿlām biographies · 8,528 TDV Encyclopedia articles · 12,954 Yāqūt place records · 5,444 Evliyā Çelebi waypoints · mints, routes, chronicles

CC BY-SA 4.0 · DOI
ITA database

2,179 historians + 2,770 works + 3,356 relations; 653 encyclopedia matches; JSON format with a 13-basin classification

Open JSON
Ridda Wars dataset

138 tribal reincorporation events; structured extraction from three classical chronicles

Open data
Ḥanbalī libraries × OpenITI

An OpenITI mapping of Ibn Taymiyya (132) and Ibn Qayyim (45) works; a 9,186-row comparison table with a reproducible build pipeline

In preparation
Turkish-Islamic NLP benchmarks

isnad-bench and dia-bench: isnād parsing and encyclopedia entity-matching tasks — aiming to be Turkey's first public benchmarks in this field

In development
Research

Ongoing research lines

AI for classical texts

A fully offline question-answering system over the Ghazālian corpus: a 13,466-chunk index, 94% retrieval success, and a voice-interface prototype

RAG · local models
Ibn Taymiyya stance mapping

Computational stance analysis across 5,426 fatwas; converging with ITA toward an integrated digital world

computational text analysis
Bibliometrics of al-Andalus studies

A pre-registered census of Andalusian studies scholarship in Turkey; international journal article in preparation

bibliometrics
Conceptual history: FIṬRA

Double-coded content analysis of the fiṭra concept in classical sources (reliability κ ≈ 0.92)

conceptual history
Historical geography and toponyms

Automatic matching experiments for Turkish historical place names with gold-standard evaluation sets

historical GIS
Institutional memory infrastructure

A searchable corpus of TIMAV's 30-year institutional output: 12,411 records with a layered confidentiality model — a service template for foundations and NGOs

institutional corpus
Methods

Four principles

1

Source fidelity

Every record is tied to its source; numbers are generated from code, never typed by hand, and are reproducible.

2

Openness

Datasets are published under open licenses, versioned, and wherever possible with a DOI.

3

Human review

Borderline decisions are never auto-resolved; they are flagged for expert judgment.

4

Honest status

Beta is beta, draft is draft. Unfinished work is not presented as finished; past projects are archived, not erased.

Publications

Academic output

Published

Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies, no. 56

The review article introducing the Atlas of Islamic History — the center's first peer-reviewed output.

Published

Zenodo data release

The Atlas of Islamic History data layers, released as versioned open data under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19183845.

Book series

History and Historiography in Civilizational Basins

ITA's source project: a 13-volume series by 100+ authors — a printed corpus feeding, and fed by, the digital atlas.

In preparation

International journal articles

Andalusian bibliometrics and digital-methods studies are in preparation for international peer-reviewed journals.

Planned series

T-Corpus Pamphlets

Short method reports in the Stanford Literary Lab mold: data pipelines, experimental results and open questions — the center's signature series.

Institutional archive

TIMAV research reports

An institutional archive of 13 workshop and research reports plus 25 books, available in full-text searchable form.

Education

Building digital capacity

The center does not only produce data; it trains people who think with data.

Live

The Language of Data

Six interactive data-literacy modules at high-school level, with examples from the history of science in Islam.

Live

MicroGPT Academy

A bilingual platform teaching how large language models work — line by line.

Term-based

Halka — reading circle

A history-of-science reading circle: six books per term, with session recordings and a discussion archive.

News

From the center

T-Corpus founded

The T-Corpus digital humanities center began operating within TIMAV; its institutional identity and publishing infrastructure are complete.

The Atlas in a peer-reviewed journal

The Atlas of Islamic History was introduced in issue 56 of the Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies; its data layers were opened on Zenodo with a DOI.

ITA workshop series

Recordings of the 13 basin workshops of the History and Historiography in Civilizational Basins project joined the atlas's video archive.

Contact

Reach us

T-Corpus — TIMAV Digital Humanities Center
Şemsi Tebrizi Mah. Dr. Abdullah Salim Sk. No: 22
Karatay / Konya, Türkiye

+90 (332) 350 07 96
bilgi@timav.org.tr
timav.org.tr
For research collaborations, dataset requests and graduate study proposals, please reach us by e-mail. Our datasets are openly licensed; citation details appear on each dataset's page.