Maksim Abdul Latif is a research assistant in eScience centre CLARIAH project, “Bridging the gap: Digital Humanities and the Arabic-Islamic corpus” at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
A former concert pianist and a teacher at Damascus conservatory (piano performance, the history of western music). In his thesis “Medieval Arabic Singing and Emotion; Data Mining The Book of Songs,” for RMA in musicology at Utrecht University, he managed to reconstruct the Old Arabic Singing Style and find connection between Medieval Arabic rhythms and emotions. Currently continuing his research on emotions in Medieval Islamic Literature, he is building a large corpus of 600 medieval Arabic books where data-mining, text-mining, and digital humanities techniques will be used to explore the role of emotions in Medieval Islamic Empire.
His research experience cover transdisciplinary subjects such as: Digital Humanities. Medieval and Modern Arabic: philosophy, Islam, music, literature, arts, politics, sufism, and culture. European Medieval musical manuscripts and arts. Western classical music, ancient and modern philosophy, social media studies, and psychology.
The Digital Orientalist 