Medieval Arabic sources are replete with stories about Muslims traveling far and wide. The abundance of such examples tempts one to believe that these traveling individuals created and maintained the pan-Islamic cultural commonwealth. Yet the Islamic written legacy is so vast that drawing decisive conclusions that traveling was indeed as widespread as our sources suggest is hardly possible. This presentation describes the use of computer-assisted research methods to enable an analysis of 29,000 biographies drawn from the massive 50-volume Taʾrīkh al-islām (“The History of Islam”), written by the Damascene historian al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348).