Preamble

This book originates from a compilation of joint works by both authors published in RPubs under (https://rpubs.com/azmanH/). The work began as an exploratory exercise, which emanates from our interest in #networkscience which lead us to #qurananalytics. We admit that this is a new field that is relatively less explored. It requires domain expertise in linguistics, particularly language in Islamic religious texts, data programming language, statistics and machine learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Furthermore, the Quran is the sacred religious text for Muslims, which makes the task requires careful considerations and treatment.

We decided to compile them into a book while knowing that the work is far from complete and at best still at exploratory stages. It dawns on us that even in exploratory stages, the amount of work required to complete the project is vast and requires massive collaboration efforts by people from various domains of expertise. The fastest way to get the interest and others to join us in this journey is to publish our works thus far and present them to as wide an audience as possible, through a book.

In this book, which we plan to be a series of books in the future, we will present an introduction to the subject of Quran Analytics, with focuses on using tools of NLP, deploying R programming language. The purpose is threefold, introducing the subject of Quran Analytics, exploring NLP tools, and using the R programming environment as the tool of choice.

Our wish is for many other researchers to follow our track, collaborate with us in our efforts - especially for people with expertise or knowledge in one of the domains, but lacking expertise in the other domain. The journey is not that hard if a person already knows one of the domains. For example, many experts in the sciences of Al Quran do not have exposure to the computing environment, and hence do not understand NLP deeply; our argument is NLP is first and foremost is about linguistics, cast within computational linguistics. As far as R programming language, despite being an uphill task for beginners to be familiar with its working environment, over the years of development, it had been made easy with many recent works on it, such as the R Studio environment as its IDE. It is just like riding a bicycle, if you know how to ride one, then almost any bicycle is the same. R is among the simplest bicycles around.

We plan this book to be an open-source concept. It is prepared using the bookdown package in R (https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/). All the data and codes will be available at in a github site to be added in the future. Some of our future works will be posted on the RPubs site (https://rpubs.com/azmanH/). Eventually, we will also produce some packages in R, which will be posted on CRAN.