This paper explores the usefulness of digital technology for the study of cultural memory in the medieval Middle East through discussion of a case study focused on a particular work and its inter-textual connections. The Thimar al-qulub fi al-mudaf wa-l-mansub (“Fruits of the heart among nouns in construct form”) is a lexicon of memorable two-word phrases and clichés, including on early and pre-Islamic topics, such as the “diwan Kisra,” referring to the ruins, on the Tigris, of a palace of the Sassanian king, Khusraw Anushirvan (r. 531–79), or “Yawm al-Jamal,” referring to a memorable moment in the first fitna, or conflict, within the Muslim community. The eastern Iranian man of letters, Abu Mansur al-Tha'alibi (d. 429/1038), composed it for an elite patron, whose library he says he used. He also cites local, Iranian authorities. Based on the work’s introduction, structure, contents, and subsequent transmission, the Thimar appears to have served as something of a reference work, but also as a tool for teaching. It is also possible to characterize its cultural values, including its ambivalence to Iran’s pre-Islamic past. But how did al-Tha'alibi concretely work, what did he have at his disposal, and what might this suggest about his selection and filtering of the past? To what extent did he rely on a written corpus, and to what extent did his sources represent a live tradition, orally transmitted and remembered? And how might we characterize the inter-textual webs within which his work sits? In other words, within what sort of “circulatory system” did he work, to use a term employed by scholars of early rabbinic literature, and how did he possibly seek to shape his society’s memory of the past? Digital search engines can help for data mining, and numerous questions, relevant to the above inquiries, can be put to them. These will be discussed, as I consider the potential, and problems, of working with such engines. I will then propose a new way of using our digital resources, involving the manipulation of software originally designed to detect student plagiarism to detect relations between Arabic works, including those that go un-cited. This research requires some preparation of texts for analysis, and the development of an entirely new methodology that uses technical advancements to identify new, previously unanswerable questions for our sources.