Manuscripts and manuscript notes have recently garnered a great deal of attention from scholars in helping us better understand the scholarly practices of the pre-modern Islamic world. Some of the manuscripts which we have access to today previously were the personal textbooks of scholars. As such, these manuscripts are full of side notes and comments written by these medieval scholars and reflect what they themselves understood of their subject of study, what they found most interesting in their studies, and how they went about learning them. Scholarship on the history of science used to perceive commentaries and super-commentaries as a sign of decadence and decline of a civilization’s scientific output. Fortunately, however, scholars of Islamic science and philosophy have recently dedicated some long overdue attention to these commentaries. At the same time, Digital humanities as a field has witnessed an efflorescence in the past few years, from which Islamic Studies has benefitted as well. Bringing these two trends together, in this paper I will analyze the marginalia of two manuscripts of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī’s (d. 1294 CE) al-Risālah al-Sharafīyah, a treatise on the science of music. For my analysis of the marginalia of the manuscripts I will utilize Digital Humanities tools and distant reading techniques such as word frequency modules, topic modelling, and semantic network analysis, that organize and visualize the data in a way that is markedly different from the more traditional close reading exercises. The aim of my presentation is to showcase some of the advantages that these techniques introduce to the field of Islamic Studies and lay the groundwork for future large-scale projects of studying manuscript marginalia using Digital Humanities tools.