Keeping track of the rapid development in digital and computational approaches to a subject oftentimes requires looking for the exciting work of doctoral students and postdocs, most of which is not (yet) formally published. Instead, one should look for presentations at academic meetings large and small. Unfortunately, there is no easy way of discovering and automatically retreaving information on presentations and, consequently, it gets much less attention and citations than it deserves. Inspired by the Work of Scott Weingart and others on collecting and analysing the bibliographic metadata for large DH conferences (which they published some while ago as “The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences”¹) as well as Maxim Romanov’s work to map the network of contributions to MESA’s Annual Meeting, I set-up a public Zotero Group as a simple infrastructural means for collectively collecting bibliographic information on digital and computational work on the predominantly Islamicate societies of South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA).

Selection criteria are very basic: any event / presentation broadly related to digital scholarship and (the cultural production) of Islamicate/ Arabicate societies should be included. In the absence of automatic importers, I manually collect bibliographic data from workshop and conference programmes (websites, PDFs, etc.). As far as possible, I include abstracts and links to individual papers, video recordings etc.

Some basic tagging has been used to organise papers beyond the meeting name insofar as recurring events have received their own tag, e.g. “idhn”, “islamicdh@brown”, “rtl@dhsi”.

Anybody interested in contributing data can become a member through clicking the relevant button on the Zotero website. Those interested in grabbing the data and re-using it, can easily export a data dump in a large variety of serialisations through the library’s web interface.

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