A Philosophical Journey on the Map: Constructing a Geospatial Bio-bibliography of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna)

Abstract

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. Organizing his scholarly works was a task initiated by his disciples, continued by medieval biobibliographers, and grappled with by modern historians of philosophy and science. In my doctoral project I am interested in two of his many fields of scholarship as well as the interaction between the two—namely celestial natural philosophy (celestial physics), and mathematical astronomy. Like my fellow medieval and modern historians of Ibn Sīnā’s corpora, I found his wanderlust and prolificacy a complicating factor in tracing his authorship in time and space. In this talk, I show how I resolved this complication by visualizing Ibn Sīnā life journey on a multilayered map, and how, using the vector data that I produced in the process, I ran a geospatial analysis to detect the time and place where he was most active in writing on the two abovementioned fields of knowledge. I will outline the workflow behind my digital humanity project including data collection, thinking about taxonomy for data organization, choice of platform, building a geodatabase with multiple layers, data visualization and analysis using a number of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms.