The BALAGHA Score: A Digital Humanities Approach to Assessing Arabic Rhetoric

The Arabic term al-balāgha (Arabic Rhetoric) refers to the use of rhetorical devices such as metaphor and simile to enhance the effectiveness of communication in Arabic. Literary criticism of Arabic Rhetoric is largely a qualitative and subjective exercise. It is dependent on the critic’s personal taste, literary background, and experience. Consequently, the field suffers from a lack of agreement between critics. There are no methodological frameworks for quantitatively assessing Arabic Rhetoric. This interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research project will adapt existing Digital Humanities concepts and methodologies. The project aims to create a scoring system to calculate the density of rhetorical devices in Arabic discourse, calculated as the number of rhetorical devices in a sample of Arabic, divided by the number of word elements in it. Derived from this, the “Balāgha Assessment for Literature in Arabic with diGital Humanities Approaches” (BALAGHA) Score will be a numerical expression of the rhetoric in the sample. The BALAGHA Score will sit independently alongside any concurrent qualitative evaluation. For the first time, a quantitative and objective comparison of the use of Arabic Rhetoric in discourse from different authors, genres, and eras will be possible. This comparison will yield valuable insights into the use of Arabic Rhetoric. Use of the BALAGHA Score to evaluate Arabic Rhetoric will be a novel Digital Humanities approach to literary analysis. The conceptual framework and methodologies developed during this project could be transferred, with appropriate language-specific modifications, to any other language. Keywords: rhetorical density, rhetorical device, rhetoricity, balagha, balaghah, BALAGHA Score, Arabic, Arabic rhetoric, quantitative linguistics, corpus linguistics, digital humanities. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15786853 ------- This abstract was presented at Pathways to the Future: A Digital Humanities Conference, held at SOAS University of London, London, UK, 7 March 2025, and organised by SOAS University of London and Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. The abstract and oral presentation introduced a novel quantitative linguistics metric called "Rhetorical Density" for quantifying the rhetoricity of texts in any language. Rhetorical Density (or Rhetoric Density) is defined as the number of rhetorical devices in a text, divided by the word count of the text, multiplied by 100. The abstract and oral presentation also proposed a framework called the BALAGHA Score for measuring the Rhetorical Density of Arabic texts in particular. This abstract is part of the ongoing BALAGHA Score project, which includes online tools, corpus development, and a forthcoming full manuscript. For project resources, visit: https://al-Balagha.com (Encyclopedia of Arabic Rhetoric) https://BalaghaScore.com (Main project website with online tools) https://Balagha-Corpus.com (Arabic texts annotated with rhetorical devices)