The First Arabic Annals: Fragments of Umayyad History by Edward Zychowicz-Coghill (review)

Abstract

visualizations. Its wellthoughtout schemas certainly support its primary use case. Its narrow focus has allowed its authors to avoid scopecreep and produce a finishable project that, due to its static nature, should in theory allow it to be sustained for a long time. At the same time, as our comments suggest, even a static site requires maintenance. And we wonder whether there will be sufficient energy and financing for this maintenance in the long run. If sufficient resources are not available to maintain this specific code base, we expect the longterm future life of this data to lie somewhere in its integration into larger datasets that can be maintained more efficiently by a more scalable code base. But here its unique data organization and narrow focus make its integration within larger corpora more difficult. The labor required for such an integration will certainly take some work and perhaps threaten its future viability. Nevertheless, the quality and precision of its semantic encoding is an encouraging sign that, when the time comes for integration into a larger code base, a near lossless transformation of the underlying data should be possible; again, with the caveat that there is enough interest and labor to study the existing schema closely and write the necessary transformation rules.