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From Biobibliographies to Geodatabases: A Time-Lapse Map of Ibn Sīnā’s Discipline-Specific Authorship, and a Geospatial Critique of His Imagined Past in Isfahan
Abstract by Pouyan Shahidi Marnani On Session   (Geobodies and Geographies)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 2:30 pm

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Ibn Sīnā (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 the interaction between two of his many fields of scholarship—namely, celestial natural philosophy, and mathematical astronomy. In my project I needed to establish a temporal relationship between Ibn Sīnā’s works on general physics, celestial physics, and astronomy to trace the development of his thought, and any major shifts in the key concepts of these fields in his corpora over time. I also needed to put Ibn Sīnā’s works in the social and political context where they were produced. I explore, for instance, possible correlations between the subject matter of Ibn Sīnā’s works and the locations in which they were produced. Detecting such correlations would open the way to investigate the underlying historical reasons such as patronage, existing intellectual traditions, networks of local or regional scholars, teaching those subjects, etc. In this three-part paper, I first show how, using two geographic information system (GIS) software, _ArcGIS Pro_ and _ArcGIS Online_, I scaffolded my research by visualizing Ibn Sīnā’s journey, scholarly production, and the political changes of his times on a multilayered, temporally dynamic map. The resulting animated, online map simulates the whereabouts of Ibn Sīnā, and the completion of his works as well as the shifting borders, and the rise and fall of the monarchies during his lifetime. In the second part of my paper, I show how the geospatial datasets that I produced in the mapping process allowed me to run a geospatial analysis on the _ArcGIS Insights_ platform to analyze the quantity of Ibn Sīnā’s scholarship on physics and astronomy across time and location. Finaly, I focus on Ibn Sīnā’s final city of residence, Isfahan, showing how I used GIS mapping to assess a claim made by the local historians of Isfahan who identified a domed building in the Dardasht quarter of the city as Ibn Sīnā’s teaching space during his stay in Isfahan. I detail the process of visualizing historical data from primary and secondary sources on a digital map to determine Ibn Sīnā’s whereabouts in the early 11th century Isfahan, and to examine the spatial relations of his places of residence and activity to the abovementioned building.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Central Asia
Iran
Islamic World
Sub Area
None