SHARIAsource Lab – Jamie Folsom
Posted on July 12, 2020On Friday June 26, 2020, Jamie Folsom (Performant Software) presented the Courts and Canons (CnC) Project as part of our Digital Islamic Law Lab series. The CnC project is an interactive, collaborative project that places the Islamic legal tradition in historical, socio-political, and geographic context. He explains how this tool will allow researchers to examine Islamic legal canons alongside the historical figures who used them and the values behind them, as part of dynamic traditions spanning and sometimes defying genres over many centuries and continents. The tool aims to connect legal canons to court cases and scholars, varied interpretive approaches, and myriad sources, facilitating insights into how and why each canon emerged and related to others. Folsom walks the Lab through the many steps in thinking and application that goes into developing this type of digital humanities tool, including categorization, collection of native field data, and much more, as well as how this comes together to organize data, register variants, and work to examine legal canons in a dynamic way.