Digital Islamic Humanities

Digital Islamic Humanities

Computational Analysis of Persian Texts with a Focus on Religious and Mystical Literature

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Yahya Ataei
Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature, Payame Noor University
10.22034/disah.2025.2076077.1055
Abstract
With the remarkable growth of digital humanities in recent decades, new horizons have opened for the analysis of classical texts, particularly within Persian religious and mystical literature. This article aims to introduce contemporary theoretical approaches and analytical tools, highlighting the potential of digital literature to support Islamic and mystical studies. Unlike studies focusing on a specific corpus, this research seeks to present a range of specialized methods and software employed in leading global universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT within the field of digital literary studies, explaining their capabilities for analyzing Persian texts. The theoretical framework of the article is grounded in concepts such as distant reading (Franco Moretti), corpus linguistics, topic modeling using the LDA algorithm, and statistical stylometry. Accordingly, software such as Voyant Tools, AntConc, MALLET, Gephi, and Word2Vec are introduced, with an examination of their application in analyzing explicit and implicit concepts, stylistic structures, and semantic patterns in Persian texts. The findings indicate that the development of technical infrastructure—including corpus-building platforms and text-mining tools—can create a systematic transformation in literary studies. Computational approaches, by minimizing individual biases, enable large-scale analysis, comparative studies of styles, and integration of statistical methods with rhetorical readings. Among the advantages of these methods are the discovery of hidden semantic patterns without imposing the researcher’s preconceptions, visualization of concepts, and the ability to analyze long and diverse texts. These tools also have extensive applications in interdisciplinary research, particularly at the intersection of literature, linguistics, and computer science. However, challenges remain, such as the need for clean, digitized corpora, difficulties in interpreting statistical outputs, the lack of semantic lexicons for classical Persian, and technical complexities in preprocessing Persian texts. Therefore, the article emphasizes the necessity of collaboration among specialists in literature, computational linguistics, and Islamic studies to advance this type of interdisciplinary research.
Keywords
digital literature
distant reading
topic modeling
statistical stylometry
computational linguistics
text mining

 

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Digital Islamic Humanities
Volume 1, Issue 1
September 2025
Pages 355-380