Projekt

The project aims at studying systematically religious diversity in 300 to 350 Medieval Muslim cities, from the 7th to the 14th century. In that time, specific groups of Non-Muslims (especially Jews, Christians or Zoroastrians) had been tolerated, accepting in turn a lower legal status (the so-called Dhimmi-status). This legal construction and political pragmatism led to a great religious diversity in the Medieval Muslim cities. This multi-religious diversity is not found in the Medieval cities under Christian rule. However, the bias of the Medieval writers, who faded out the existence of other religious communities, has so far inhibited an empirically grounded view of this diversity. The project aims at producing a comprehensive database accessible via interactive visualization as well as a pilot web-based geo-temporal multi-view system to analyse data on multi-religious cities. Automatic text mining will be used to collect and collate sources and to visualize their bias for the first time as a heuristic method in Medieval studies. Thus, this cooperative project of historians from Middle Eastern studies and visualization researchers will revive historiographical methods of heuristics, source analysis and narratives and at the same time boost methods of visual analytics and information visualization.

• Prof. Dr. Dorothea Weltecke

  Universität Frankfurt am Main
  Fachbereich 8
  Historisches Seminar
  Frankfurt
  

• Dr. Steffen Koch

  Universität Stuttgart
  Fakultät 5: Informatik, Elektrotechnik
  Institut für Visualisierung und
  Interaktive Systeme
  Stuttgart