Beatrice Gruendler and Mahmoud Kozae, Human Intuition and Computational Clustering: Tackling a Fluid Textual Tradition

Suggested Citation:
Beatrice Gruendler and Mahmoud Kozae, Human Intuition and Computational Clustering: Tackling a Fluid Textual Tradition. Interface Critique 5 (2025): 142–172.

DOI: 10.11588/ic.2025.1.113536. 

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Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

Beatrice Gründler (PhD Harvard University 1995) is Professor of Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research includes Arabic codicology, classical Arabic poetry and its social context, Arabic book history, and the role of Arabic in global literature. She is the author of The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century (1993, Arabic trans. 2004), Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rumi and the Patron’s Redemption (2003), The Life and Times of Abu Tammam (Akhbar Abi Tammam) by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (2015), and The Rise of the Arabic Book (2020). She is also a contributing editor to Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches (2000), Writers and Rulers: Perspectives from Abbasid to Safavid Times (2004), and Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms (2007), and An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (2024). She was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation and an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, both in 2017.

Mahmoud Kozae is a researcher specializing in software solutions for the humanities, with engineering expertise and academic background in Arabic studies. He earned a BEng in Electronics from Tanta University and worked for some years as a software developer before finishing a BA and MA in Arabic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Kozae leads the design and implementation of specialized scholarly editing software in the Kalila wa Dimna project and is responsible for the architecture and co-development of the Digital Edition of Kalila wa Dimna. He has previously worked for “Kalila wa Dimna – Wisdom Encoded” (2015-2017), then continued on the AnonymClassic project (2018-2023) and ALC/Arabic Literature Cosmopolitan (2020-2027). Recently, he finished his MA thesis titled “Developing Transcription Software for the Kalila wa Dimna: Applying a Software Engineering Process in (Arabic) Textual Scholarship.”