Project update - Week #2

[mkd38]

The team met on Tuesday for our weekly Project Meeting. The first half of the meeting was concerned with concluding business of SSH keys/personal access tokens begun last week. All team members were able to successfully pull, push, and commit changes to the repo from the GitBash terminal. @AAM195 shared a few commands that helped us with this process.

The team then discussed how to bring our research question into sharper focus. We are agreed that we want to look at the density of devices per unit of text. However, there are a number of questions that we need to answer as a team, namely:

• What unit of text ought we to use? I initially proposed that we select x percent of ayahs and use that as our unit of analysis, but @aisha-2023 advises that this would be a somewhat unnatural way to engage with the text and instead recommends we look at density of device per surah.

• How much of the text can we realistically analyze? Two of them team members as well as our mentor literate in Arabic to some degree or another, but we need to get a better idea of how long our markup process will take. Our project mentor proposes a minimum of two surahs.

• Which surahs?

• Which devices? Based on my knowledge of Arabic rhetoric, in our project proposal I identified simile and metaphor, consonance and contrast, and epanalepsis. After further reflection, I suggest that we scrap consonance as a device, because like rhyme and other sound-based device, we can't reasonably expect these to translate to another language.

Tasks:

• [ ] Each team member research the text and propose a minimum of two surahs to be subject to analysis. Team is invited and encouraged to consider this through various lenses - e.g., should we look at surahs that are especially well-known? should we select surahs that are though to be particulary beautiful prose? there are also other practical considerations about what can be achieved with what time remains to us in the semester.
• [ ] @reneedubaich and @mkd38 to consult our respective experts for feedback on our selection of devices

Agenda for next meeting: Review each member's proposed surahs and come to a consensus on how many surahs and which ones we wish to analyze.

[prb55]

This is a really cool project and I'm excited to see the result at the end of the semester. I'm not really familiar with Arabic, so could you please clarify what an ayah and surah are? Clearly, time is a constraint to analyze the whole Quran. Do you know if there are any particular sections of the Quran which are more important? If there are, maybe guys you could analyze those sections as they have more importance. Overall, it looks like you guys are off to a great start!

[aisha-2023]

@prb55 In the context of the Qur'an, Surah means chapter and Ayah means verse. There isn't any ubiquitous agreement on which sections of the Qur'an are more important, so we are trying to narrow down our choices to sections that are either known for their prose or are popular choices during oral recitations.