How to (Try to) Tame a Disaster?

The Disasters Corpus in Classical Arabic Sources (DiCCAS) [1] was conceived as a resource that would encompass a diverse range of materials, including the Qur’an and the ḥadīth collections Saḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Saḥīḥ Muslim, as well as several significant historical orks, such as al-Ṭabarī’s Kitāb Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk and Ibn Taghrībirdī’s Kitāb al-Nujūm al-zāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira. The corpus also incorporates adab texts by al-Jāhiẓ, notably his Rasāʾil, and Ibn al-Jawzī’s al-Mudhish. DiCCAS is designed to allow historians to compare different accounts and narratives of disasters in a variety of classical sources. While the breadth of this corpus is essential to fulfil the objectives of the ‘Environmental Anomalies & Political Legitimacy in Global Eurasia, 12th–14th Century’ project, it presents a formidable challenge for the digital humanist whose job is developing a structure capable of accommodating a variety of text types and their respective idiosyncrasies. This paper discusses the validity of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as an encoding language, on the basis that its inherent flexibility and adaptability make it an optimal tool for a project of such scope, and seeks to outline the methodological hurdles encountered in the creation of a historical corpus. Finally, it explores the potential for integrating contemporary technological tools with classical sources. In doing so, it aims to assess how these tools can facilitate the comparative analysis of multiple sources, allowing researchers to understand the political and power strategies employed during and after a disaster.