  The development of digital humanities has opened new perspectives in the
history of Islam: whether dealing with thin or sometimes vast source corpora
(such as S\=ira, al-Tbar\=i, al-Dahab\=i, etc.), these tools allow us to
approach texts much more effectively from a statistical perspective, in order
to support more general hypotheses and move beyond case studies. Drawing on the
work of a number of researchers as well as our own, we propose to study the
potentialities and limitations posed by computer methods for the history of
medieval Islam, keeping in mind that the conclusions may prove useful to
researchers of other periods. We will particularly emphasize two tools: the
construction and use of relational databases, and more recently, the tagging of
sources, with the stated goal of addressing some of the problems posed by the
previous method.
