About Arabist
Arabist is an AI-assisted paleography platform for the Arabic manuscript tradition. It gives scholars, libraries, and archives a fast, structured first pass at codicological work that traditionally takes days — while keeping the human expert firmly in charge.
Mission
Preserve and make accessible the vast written heritage of the Arabic-script tradition, by lowering the technical friction between a folio image and a research-ready report.
Vision
A future where every library and every researcher — from major national collections to a graduate student with a phone photograph — can produce specialist-grade transcriptions, catalog records, and translations in minutes rather than months, without giving up scholarly rigor.
Who we serve
- Research libraries and manuscript repositories
- University departments in Islamic studies, Arabic, history, and religion
- Museums and archives with Arabic-script holdings
- Independent researchers, philologists, and codicologists
- Publishers and editors preparing critical editions
Research fields
Classical Arabic paleography, Islamic manuscript studies, ḥadīth and legal codices, Sufi literature, philosophy and kalām, poetry and adab, scientific and medical manuscripts, maghribī and mashriqī scripts, and marginalia and glossing traditions.
Technology
Arabist combines domain-tuned prompting of frontier vision-language models with a deterministic pipeline for morphology, glossary, translation, catalog record generation, and bibliographic enrichment via CrossRef. Every report is fully reviewable and exportable; output is designed for human verification, not automated publication.
Editorial stance
Arabist is an accelerator, not an oracle. Transcriptions are diplomatic and dating is approximate. Every result is meant to be checked and, where needed, corrected by a specialist before it enters a catalog, edition, or publication. Our Trust Center describes exactly what the AI does and does not do.
Contact
For general questions, use our contact form. For institutional pilots and licensing, use contact-sales. Security reports: security@arabist.io.