The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

What is #PalestineToday? #PalestineToday is the social media hashtag created to encourage Palestinians to share their Nakpa stories  by sharing their place of birth on  Palestine Today interactive map website.  Palestinian Today is a project made by visualizing Palestine (VP).  VP creates data-driven tools to advance a factual, rights-based narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. This project involves researchers, designers, technologists, and communications specialists work in partnership with civil society actors to amplify their impact and promote justice and equality. VP was launched in 2012. VP is the first portfolio of Visualizing Impact (VI), an independent, non-profit laboratory for innovation at the intersection of data science, technology, and design. Here is a video on How to navigate  Palestine Today interactive map and share your story.  Tip: Use Your Mouse Scroll while navigating interactive Map Why #PalestineToday? The 1948 Pales...

Mohamed Amer, MA, Global cultures, Bologna University, 2019    There is no doubt that the first step in decolonizing any cultural heritage object is to re-document it in a way that is appropriate to its historical context. Consequently, digital documentation has a significant role in the decolonization process, since historical contexts can be rewritten better during digital documentation. Hence, it comes the vital role of Linked Open Data in recontextualizing the history of heritage belongings by using cultural heritage management software, which is based on LOD.     Since culture by nature is a cross border and interlinked, the value of Linked Open Data is very high and also very challenging. Rosetta Stone was a key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian civilization by linking the three writings Ancient Egyptian language, Demotic, and Ancient Greek to each other. Linked Open Data can perform the same function as it connects the different resources, rep...

The text encoding of this French manuscript that dates back to Napoleon's expedition to Egypt was undertaken as part of the American University in Cairo's DH program series of pilot projects. The manuscript is written by the French military officer E. L. F. Hauet describing Napoleon's military campaign in Egypt. It is the first of four manuscripts that cover the Battles of Abu Kir (land, not sea), Heliopolis, the siege of Cairo, and the Desaix's march to Upper Egypt. The transcription of the original text and the text encoding have been prepared by Mark Muehlhaeusler and Abdel Aziz Galal. Text encoding has been done using "Oxygen XMl editor" (XML Lite). Basic encoding, capturing lexical information only. All hyphenation, punctuation, and variant spellings have been retained. Formatting and layout information preserved to the maximum extent possible. Capitalization has been normalized to the st...

Mohamed Habib a scholar studying Digital Huminities at Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna has just created DHINAR , the first Digital journal in Arabic language for Digital Humanities. "Very pleased to launch the first Digital journal in Arabic language for Digital Humanities DHINAR "Digital Humanities in Arabic". Our goal is to enrich the Arab ic content of digital humanities by creating a community for Arab digital humanists, students, and for the practitioners as well. The most important value of this project is to achieve the knowledge equality. The people who are interested in the digital domain, especially the digital human heritage are welcome to join the community! " يسرني أن اعلن عن اطلاق أول مجلة رقمية باللغة العربية مخصصة للعلوم الإنسانية الرقمية تهدف الى إثراء المحتوى العربي للعلوم الإنسانية الرقمية من خلال إنشاء مجتمع للباحثين في المجال الرقمي والطلاب والممارسين الرقميين العرب. وتعد القيمة الأهم لهذا المشروع هي تحقيق المساوا...

My next foray into digital humanities ( you can read about mapping the nationalities of AUC students here ) involves the venerable students newspaper the Caravan (aka the AUC Review , Campus Caravan , and Caravan Weekly ). The first issue was published in 1925 and it is still going strong today. Currently, we have issues up to 1996 available in our Digital Library though some years are missing (either because of scanning issues or we don’t have them at all, in the latter case please let us know if you have copies). The Caravan has been bilingual through most of its history, though this project will focus on the English issues only. With the excellent work done by the digitization lab we have over 4,000 English pages scanned, and through ABBYY FineReader we’ve generated text files for each page, creating a corpus to explore. Unfortunately for some pages the text recognition leaves a lot to be desired; often this is caused by poor quality printing or ABBYY being confused. ...

The Omani ministry of Heritage and Culture has announced it is sharing more than 4,000 manuscripts electronically to researchers on its website . The manuscripts are distributed in four fields, focusing mostly on the humanities, Hadith, Quran, jurisprudence, history, literature, as well as astronomy, medicine and marine science.