AI Natural Language Processing and Computational Text Analysis of Arabic: Analysing Official State Islamic Sermons

I am currently working on a research paper based on the texts of 300 Arabic-language Islamic sermons delivered in Egyptian mosques between 2014 and 2020. Thus far, I have relied on manual translation and coding of each sermon. However, in presenting this work at conferences over the summer, I have connected with several social scientist colleagues engaged in innovative new research methods, particularly text as data and the use of natural language processing, who have suggested several exciting avenues I can pursue to make this most of this data. Although I studied Quantitative Methods during my MSc in Politics Research at the University of Oxford, I do not currently possess the research skills to do so, and am seeking funding to engage in research methods training in the spring and summer of 2024 at Oxford’s Spring School in Advanced Research Methods, the University of Edinburgh’s Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, and the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis. This training will enable me to, for example, utilize AI text recognition software to subject the data to natural language processing and large scale computational text analysis.