DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5533889
title: Al-Ṭabarī's Direct Informants

description: <strong>Al-Ṭabarī’s Direct Informants</strong> This release pertains to a series of eight blog posts that investigate citation practices involving the phrases ‘he told me’/‘he told us’ (<em>ḥaddathanī</em>/<em>ḥaddathanā</em>) in three of Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) major works. These are his universal history, <em>Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk</em>; his Quran commentary, <em>Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān</em> (referred to as <em>Tafsīr</em>); and his <em>Tahdhīb al-āthār</em>. We hope to publish in a peer-reviewed journal our work here with additional reflections, data and corrections. The data consists of the following: Text-reuse alignments: Text-reuse alignments for the three texts from the 2021.1.4 release of the OpenITI corpus, generated with passim software. Bibliography: The books cited or used for data generation from the 2021.1.4 release of the OpenITI corpus. Generated data: All the generated data files in CSV format, using Tab as the column separator. The folder contains six files: Transmission Chains: We extracted the <em>isnād</em>s from all three texts and separated the names into individual cells. The <em>isnād</em>s consist of up to twelve names. The table contains the following columns: Milestone id: the milestone in which the extracted <em>isnād</em> occurs Isnad text: the original text of the extracted <em>isnād</em> Source: the source from which the <em>isnād</em> comes Number of names: the number of names in the <em>isnād</em> after they have been separated from one another Name in position X: the name at a specific position within the order of the <em>isnād</em> Name Normalisation: All names that appear in the <em>isnād</em>s, listed in the ‘Surface form’ column, have been normalised to a single Latin-script version in the ‘Normalisation’ column. The four columns that follow indicate whether the name appears in a specific position within an <em>isnād</em> (‘true’ means it does, ‘false’ means it does not). The table contains the following columns: Surface form (in Arabic): the name as it appears in Arabic script Normalisation (transliteration): the normalised (transliterated) form of the Arabic name Appears in position X: ‘true’ or ‘false’ values which show whether the name has appeared in the specified position in an <em>isnād</em> or <em>isnād</em>s Appears only in position 1: ‘true’ or ‘false’ values indicating whether the name has appeared only in position 1 Metadata columns, including: pos0_inawork_only_scripts, Direct Informant_secondarylit, MentionedOutsideAs_informant, died_hijri, died_miladi, Tabari_met_in, Found_in, Comments_fromBioSources, Comments_fromBioSources, Comments_basedonTBooks_Searches, Comments_Other Transmission Chains-normalised: This is a version of the Transmission Chains table in which all names have been normalised and most of the cells containing non-names as well as most of the rows containing multiple <em>isnād</em>s have been deleted. The ‘Number of names’ column retains the original values even if a number has changed during the normalisation stage. Direct Informants Position Frequencies: This table shows the most (and least) commonly cited names of the direct informants in each <em>isnād</em> position. The data contains all names in all positions. The table contains the following columns: Name Count in position X: the number of times the name appears at a specific <em>isnād</em> position in all three books Direct Informants Overview: This is an extended version of the preceding table, showing the direct informants and the number of times they are cited in each of the three works. The table contains the following columns: Name in position 1: the name of the direct informant in position 1 Source: the source(s) from which the name comes Count: the total number of times the informant is cited in all three works Count in Taʾrikh: the number of times the informant is cited in the Taʾrikh Count in Tafsīr: number of times the informant is cited in the Tafsīr Count in Tahdhīb: number of times the informant is cited in the Tahdhīb Cumulative count: the cumulative number of citations of the current name and all preceding names in the sorted table Cumulative percentage: the cumulative percentage of all citations accounted for by the current name and all preceding names in the sorted table Metadata columns, including: died_hijri, died_miladi, Tabari_met_in, Found_in, Comments_fromBioSources Texts Name Counts: This table shows how many names are cited in each work and in combinations of works. The table features only direct informants (position 1), though we have data for positions 2 and 3 also. The table contains the following columns: Source: the work or works in question Count of names in position 1: the number of direct informants cited in position 1 in the specified work or works