***This post was written by Georgi Obatnin, PhD student on the Caliphal Finances project. Hear more about Georgi’s work with digital tools in our first IMES Seminar Spring 2025 lecture on 13th January!***
The field of papyrology has been very fortunate to have the Arabic Papyrology Database (the APD), papyri.info and the Princeton Geniza Project accessible online. These databases make papyrological research accessible to countless scholars around the world and have also been of great help to the members of our team. However, despite their incredible utility they are primarily tailored towards a specific type of usage—they are great for looking up a document, a word or perhaps a phrase, but do not easily lend themselves to more complex analysis.
As my PhD project aiming to explore the shift from taxation in kind to taxation in cash began to develop, it became apparent that a deeper study of the Abbasid and Umayyad monetary usage is in order. To understand how the money was used, I looked to trace the changes in money-related terminology as it appears in the documentary record. This entailed going through almost a thousand documents from the pre-Fatimid period and logging all the money-related terms appearing in them. This work would not have been realistic (within a timeline of a PhD) without the access granted by the APD—the friction of acquiring and going through all the necessary editions in person would have simply been too high. At the same time, the APD alone would not have been sufficient to give the kind of insight needed: tracking multiple words and phrases across hundreds of documents, let alone analysing and visualising this data have never been intended to be a part of the APD toolkit.

Document amounts by type. An example of data visualisation within the Obsidian database of Georgi’s PhD project.
Typically, the main digital tool for tasks like these would have been a spreadsheet—a tool undoubtedly all too familiar to most readers. Before the advent of the spreadsheet, another way of organising information for a project like this would’ve been a card index. Within the realms of papyrology, S.D. Goitein is known for the size and depth of his index card collection on the Cairo Genizah—a bank of knowledge so valuable, that it has even been partially digitized for others to use. A digital version of an index card collection is Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia where the entries are connected with each other on multiple levels through the use of hyperlinks. An exploration of the monetary terminology called for this index-card/Wikipedia-esque approach. The project needed a database flexible enough to hold texts and notes of unlimited length (i.e. descriptions of the documents or the terms used). It also needed to be internally interlinked like Wikipedia and lend itself to the types of analysis usually performed traditional rigid (i.e. SQL-based) databases.
Obsidian is an open-source markdown-based note taking software, designed to minimise note-taking related friction. Its two crucial features—ease of linking and support for the plugin aptly named “Dataview” makes it a perfect candidate for the task. The Obsidian database consists of two types of cards—index cards for the documents are used to record the general information about the document, contents and monetary and tax terminology in use. The index cards for the terminology focus on the terms used and link back to the document cards where the term appears. The information in the database does not require specialised skills to access, much like Wikipedia.

Example of an “index card” in the Obsidian database of Georgi’s PhD project.
The Dataview plugin allows to flexibly create spreadsheets out of the data already stored in the index cards, which are all formatted in a way friendly to the plugin. The processing happens on-device and is nearly instantaneous, so the user can easily amend and change their spreadsheet to fit their needs. The spreadsheets can also be exported into .csv format, used widely for data analysis and visualisation in e.g. the Python programming language.
Obsidian’s flexibility, coupled with its ability to provide data files that can be used by the basic data analysis software, has already allowed for some exciting discoveries. Its speed and ease of use have also enabled the team to access the information on the spot during our discussions and to test our hypotheses quickly and with minimal effort.
Banner image: data visualisation in the Obsidian database of Georgi’s PhD project.
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