Undate: humanistic dates for computation

Abstract undate is an ambitious, in-progress effort to develop a pragmatic Python package for computation and analysis of temporal information in humanistic and cultural data, with a particular emphasis on uncertain, incomplete, and imprecise dates and with support for multiple calendars. The development of undate is grounded in domain-specific work on digital and computational humanities projects from multiple institutions, including Shakespeare and Company Project , Princeton Geniza Project , and Islamic Scientific Manuscript Initiative . With increasing support for different formats and calendars, Undate aims to bridge technical gaps across different communities and methodologies. In this article, we describe the undate software package and the functionality of the core Undate and UndateInterval classes to work with dates and date intervals. We discuss why this software exists, how it expands on and generalizes prior work, how it compares to other approaches and tools, and its current limitations. We describe the development methodology used to create the software, our plans for active and continuing development, and the potential undate has to impact computational humanities research.