I am the Principle Investigator of The Digital Guide to Theatre of the Middle East: 21st Century Volume ( DGTOME) provides essential information on the best-known, best-loved, most significant, and most influential plays/theatrical works written and/or performed in the MENA theatre in the last two decades. The project benefits from a transnational collaboration of experts and artists and its website will launch by the end of Summer 2020.

In my on-going collaboration with a colleague at the Department of Comparative Literature and Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, I have been engaged with several phases of data mining, and content analysis in a large corpus of canonical Persian literary works produced in the last ninety years. These phases include digitization of the novels and play scripts, computational analysis of the content, contextual clues, and topic models through Python programming, and lastly, visualization of the results. I will present the outcome of this collaboration at the Digital Humanities 2020 conference to be held in Ottawa in July 2020.