Digital Humanities in Pakistan is an evolving and diverse field, shaped by the work of researchers and institutions engaging with the region’s rich literary, linguistic, and cultural heritage. While no single account can capture the full breadth of this landscape, looking closely at individual projects can offer valuable insights into its possibilities and directions. This article explores two such projects emerging from institutions of higher education in Pakistan. The first of these two, the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) project is based at Aga Khan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. The CDH itself is a part of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, one of the University’s research institutes located in London. The second project, Punjabi Literary Journals, is housed in the Digital Archive of Lahore University of Management Sciences.
While both projects are textually oriented, KITAB’s scope is particularly expansive in its scope as it seeks to examine how authors writing in classical Arabic “frequently made use of past works, cutting them into pieces and reconstituting them to address their own outlooks and concerns” using a corpus of texts comprising more than 10,200 text and metadata files (https://kitab-project.org/about/). The research focus is on premodern Arabic works from the 8th century CE to about the 15th century CE. From analysing citation networks, to detecting how much text to consider when accounting for textual reuse, to tagging references to the Quran, KITAB draws attention to adapting computational approaches for Left-To-Right (LTR) texts that operate in a densely intertextual network. The project has created its own OCR pipeline using Kraken, and as with most non-Latinate projects, the OCR process still requires manual clean-up. The texts themselves are tagged using OpenITI (Open Islamicate Texts Initiative) mARkdown format which bypasses the text direction problems that plague encoding schemes.
One of the most intriguing aspects of KITAB is its engagement with natural language processing. As the project’s PI, Sarah Bowen Savant, notes, the next phase of KITAB will involve developing and training language models to detect paraphrases and translations across the corpus to find linguistic matches that are “semantically similar but worded differently” (https://kitab-project.org/about/).
By comparison, the Punjabi Literary Journals project is significantly narrower in scope as it is a collection of notable Punjabi journals published between 1950 and early 1960s. The collection is framed by an introduction by Julien Columeau who donated digital copies of the journals to the Digital Archive. Columeau’s introduction offers a look into the relationship between Punjabi and Urdu, and into the formation of Punjabi written in Pakistan as distinct from that composed in India. Pakistani Punjabi, using the Urdu script in the Nastaliq style and drawing on Urdu literary networks, comes to understand itself as the language of a new postcolonial nation, and these journals are instrumental in establishing that linguistic identity (https://archive.lums.edu.pk/punjabi-literary-journals/). The archive consists of five journals, Haq Ullah, Punjabi Adab, Punjabi Darbar, Punjabi Faqir Muhammad Faqir, and Punjabi Rasalay.
Compared to other projects in the Digital Archive, the collection does not offer any technical information or metadata, simply directing the user to scanned images of the texts. Yet what it provides is access to rare print texts, contextualized within a publication network that allows the user to form their critical questions about the material, rather than be guided by a research team’s scholarly approach. In many ways, LUMS’ static collections bring into focus a foundational yet sometimes overlooked aspect of Digital Humanities: the work of digitising texts to preserve them and make them accessible to wider audiences, even without the development of specialised tools or analytical frameworks.
This brings me to why I chose to document these two projects as representative of the work being done in DH in Pakistan. Both share a commitment to making publicly available rare texts, along with research methods and tools in DH. KITAB makes this explicit by aligning itself with collaborators such as OpenITI who also emphasize open source software and sharing of datasets via GitHub and Zenodo. Similarly, LUMS Digital Archive has made these mid-20th century texts available, alongside commentary and framing, both of which can aid researchers and interested readers alike. An equally noteworthy aspect of the Digital Archive’s collection practices is its engagement with citizen scholars, who contribute not only by sharing documentary materials with the Archive, as exemplified by the Partition Testimonies: Ishtiaq Ahmed Collection, but also by participating as interlocutors whose perspectives inform the interpretation and contextualisation of collections, as seen in the accounts of women associated with the Women’s Action Forum in the Walking in the City project.
On a related note, the Digital Archive documents work by individuals such as Columeau, and objects such as the narratives of resistance by women artists, which share close ties with Rekhta, one of the largest public archives of Urdu writing. Rekhta’s collaborative model, which brings together academic and citizen scholars, illustrates how Digital Humanities can extend beyond conventional institutional frameworks of scholarship and archiving, opening up new possibilities for public participation in the preservation, interpretation, and circulation of cultural materials.
Both these projects also show how DH from the Global South is actively shaping how knowledge flows and whose histories are preserved. One of the main aims of the Digital Archive at LUMS is to preserve “the accounts of marginalized and subaltern groups” (https://archive.lums.edu.pk/?_gl=1*17ndren*_gcl_au*MTM5OTYyNTE1My4xNzkzMDQ2NDc4). These efforts invite a shift in how we understand Digital Humanities in and from Pakistan not just as a field that merely adopts methods developed elsewhere, but as one that actively shapes its methodological directions, expands the possibilities of digital research, and challenges established assumptions about whose knowledge is preserved and whose languages inform technological development.
Cover image: Diffchecker visualisation taken from the blog post “New KITAB visualizations” by Peter Verkinderen, published 3 December 2021. Accessed 6 Novemeber 2026.
