Opportunities and Challenges for Indexing a Polyglot Society: The Development of HIMME

More languages and literary traditions existed simultaneously in the medieval Middle East than any individual scholar can hope to master.  Disciplinary norms have mandated that scholars focus on one or perhaps two languages, but the actual historical society was bewilderingly polyglot.  Can digital methods provide an opportunity for overcoming our individual scholarly limitations?  On the other hand, what dynamics of multilingual cultures challenge modern digital approaches themselves?  This talk will open a conversation centered around the development of the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME: https://medievalmideast.org/).