Computational Analysis of the Qur'an using Perl and CGI

This tutorial can serve multiple purpose for diffierent appetites:

• It can help a student of computer science know few programmaing tips using perl as a language and the Qur'an as a domain text. However, since there are many good perl tutorial over the net, for example http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/, I am not going to descibe in detail the basics, rather I will contentrate on issues related to language processing, and text analysis.
• It can also help someone beginning computational experiments with text processing and text mining, for him I am forcing using Perl and Qur'an in the context of learning.
• It will help an Arabic student who is aware of programmanig to start his/her own experiments with the Qur'an.

This tutorial is intended in the first place to be a reference for me, because I myself started to learn these things. After going through other tutorials I realized that I have at my hand things brought in from various source, and If I do not document them properly, they will grow out of control, so I though I would present them in a tutorial form, and share them with the world so someone else might get some benefit.

As my research interest is the Qur'an, my example in this tutorial will refer to it. Knowledge of Qur'an and would be necessary at some places, however, I will try to explain concepts regardless of the domain, so you may apply them to other texts as well.

I made myself clear above that I am also a beginner like you, and this tutorial is evolving, and hence I might not be presenting perl codes in its best efficient manner. There are lots of ways to reach to an output, for the time being, the correct output is my focus, no matter how you reach to it.

I am not aware of any other tutorial that covers this topic considering the Qur'an, and hence would appreciate if anyone getting any benefit to reference this page and give credit to the author. My motivation behind this tutorial is Qur'an in the first place. I want this book to be handy and would like to exploit computatioal means to investigate it further. I want to establish a bridge for students between technicall barrier (i.e., CGI, perl, etc.) and domain knowledge (i.e., Quran, Arabic language, science of Tafsir, etc.).

Tutorials

• What you need to start: What programs you need. What data files? etc.
• First Programs: to dispaly simple message and simple CGI script, as well as simple file handling.
• More advanced file handling: This involves reading simple flat files for the whole Quran, and then creating XML files for each sura, and then displaying these XML through CSS and XSLT

Miscelleneous

• Few vi tips!

Come and enjoy! Let me know your feedback on tutorial [at] texminingthequran [dot] com!