Medieval Middle Eastern society expressed itself in a greater number of simultaneous literary traditions than any other portion of the pre-industrial world. Despite this fact, for reasons of subfields’ particular institutional histories, very few scholars can or do approach the Middle East between 800 and 1500 CE in ways that consider the full range of literary evidence available. Instead, the scholarly study of the medieval Middle East has to a surprisingly large degree been balkanized among distinct subfields, each privileging a different literary tradition. The development of Digital Humanities provides medieval Middle Eastern historians an opportunity to overcome scholarly subfield divisions by accessing a fuller range of evidence rather than omitting sources due to linguistic limitations. This talk presents a digital humanities project currently under development which seeks to bridge the subfields’ divides by making visible the ways that medieval Middle Eastern primary sources in different languages discuss the same places, many of the same people, and often the same social practices. In other words, the literary traditions were linguistically but not sociologically separate. The project is developing a multi-lingual index of selected medieval Middle Eastern primary sources in a range of different languages, so that a scholar searching for, say, Fatima or Salah al-Din or Baghdad will find references which span the linguistic spectrum. The project will be extensible, so that additional primary sources can be added progressively. Each reference includes translations where available, so that scholars can access the contents of sources even beyond their linguistic training. This paper has three goals. First, it contrasts the polyglot and multiconfessional culture of the medieval Middle East with the limits of current scholarship, to show the benefits of taking a broader view of available evidence. Secondly, this paper proposes that digital tools, such as the project to be discussed, are useful sites of discovery to enable scholars to develop more deeply informed models of the medieval Middle East. Finally, this paper demonstrates how digital tools permit more flexible and manipulable data visualization than print media, thereby avoiding merely replacing one canon with an alternative. The difference of DH is that multiple alternative frameworks for understanding medieval society can be explored simultaneously without designating a dominant discourse, as was required by the static nature of print. In this way, DH scholarship may more closely approximate the many voices and views simultaneously embedded in our sources for the medieval Middle East.