The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

We recently came across this interesting and extensive initiative by "The Maydan" . Below is a description of this ongoing project as it appeared on their website. The Maydan is proud to introduce a new initiative highlighting digital resources and projects in the field of Islamic Studies. Included in this roundup are manuscripts collections, digitized manuscripts, and manuscripts catalogues from universities and libraries around the world. *This is an ongoing project – if you know of similar resources that we may have missed  please email us at publish@themaydan.com . **In the near future we plan to add to this page essays from scholars who have engaged these manuscript collections/catalogues. Collections Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI ) The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition, Institute for Advanced Study The Sinai Palimpsests Project Mingana Collection, University of Birmingham The Minassian Collection of Qur’anic Manuscripts, Brown University Pri

Shehab Ismail, Postdoctoral Fellow in Department III at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, has been awarded 30,000 USD by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) for his project Digital History of British Colonial Cairo: Media and the Potentialities of History. The project aims at developing a site to publish electronic articles that use various audio-visual media to reconstruct an understanding of the history of Cairo under British occupation. It is based on the employment of media and maps in order to achieve two objectives: 1) overcome publication barriers that prevent the optimal use of the possibilities of Digital Media, 2) provide a new style of critical historical writing about Cairo to readers in Arabic.

The Vienna Corpus of Arabic Varieties (VICAV) was set up with two main purposes in mind: to serve as a virtual research platform targeting the particular needs of Arabic dialectology and to serve as a test bed for newly developed text technological methodologies and tools. As part of these efforts, it was designed as a means to promote the efficient exchange of ideas and experiences in an active international community. Being located at the border between areal and corpus linguistics, the aim is to gather varying digital language resources for a number of different localities. The description of the different varieties will hinge on language profiles, concise and uniformly structured form sheets that offer information on the research history, available literature, salient grammatical features etc. of particular varieties. VICAV makes accessible bibliographies, dictionaries, glossaries, and different types of transcribed texts. The project aims at providing a

The project Corpus Coranicum of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2007-2024) is exploring the Qur'an from three different angles: (1) Textual History: databases of ancient manuscripts and variant readings give insights into its textual history, (2) Qur’an in History: a documentation of texts from the cultural and religious environment outlines Late Antique features in the text, (3) History of the Text: a literary-chronological commentary studies the Qur’an as a developing speech proclaimed during more than 20 years to a changing audience. The digital publication is also providing other digital research tools like its font ("Coranica") and a text concordance.

The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington is currently working on a project revolving around Mahmud AbdulBaki (1526-1600) who wrote poetry under the penname Baki (Bāḳī = the Enduring) during the reigns of 4 Ottoman sultans.  As the acclaimed “Sultan of Poets” during the so-called “Golden Age” of Ottoman literature, Baki’s influence as a poet echoed down through the centuries.  He was also a regular guest at the salons and private entertainments of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520-1566) and a noted scholar and jurist who rose to become the Chief Magistrate of the European Provinces, the second highest canon law position in the Empire.  Whether or not he was the “best” poet ever among the Ottomans is still argued today but very few would claim that he was not the most famous. Among the goals of the project is to bring digital technologies to bear on the problems of dealing with large and complex manuscript

  Learn about these primary sources for Islamic law and legal practice in pre-modern Muslim societies. This online presentation is the first ever collection of scattered editions of legal documents from the 2 nd /8 th to the 9 th /15 th century, often with improved readings compared to earlier print versions. Documents are presented with the Arabic text in modern spelling and with full bibliographical data. Corpus of Arabic Legal Documents "CALD".

This blog intends to be an open space for digital humanists, librarians, scholars, and researchers working in or on Egypt and the Middle East to share their respective projects and discuss any ideas and tools regarding digital humanities. This blog is created and managed by the Digital Humanities Program at the American University in Cairo library. If you would like to contribute please contact Abdel Aziz Galal , Digital Humanities librarian at AUC. Please consider joining our mailing list .

Dr. Dale J. Correa at the University of Texas at Austin published a great blog post last week about the KITAB Project and text reusage in Arabic works. It's available here: https://blogs.lib.utexas.edu/texlibris/2018/10/18/kitab-project-brings-distant-reading-to-middle-eastern-studies/ and the entire project website is here: http://kitab-project.org/ Perhaps something like the excellent Native American treaty text borrowing article Mark Muehlhaeusler  shared during the workshop ( http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-02-digitally-analyzing-the-uneven-ground/ ) is coming our way; Dr. Sarah Savant, who is part of the project, posted something similar awhile ago: http://kitab-project.org/2018/05/02/detecting-what-authors-took-from-earlier-works/ Inshallah, the tools they're developing for OCR and analysis will open up the ever-growing digitized Arabic corpus available to researchers (such as the Arabic Collections Online project ).

David McCandless one of the active figures in the field of Digital Humanities and particularly infographics and data visualization is the creator of "Information is beautiful" . The site provides interesting infographics and data charts based on facts and data in a visually appealing manner. Among his very interesting work are a handful of visualizations related to the Middle East, the Arab and Muslim world. What Islamic Golden Age Thinkers Discovered Long before the West. Islamic Sects, major schools and notable branches.

Ryder Kouba the AUC's digital collections archivist shared with us today the announcement of a new DH project revolving around modern Cairo's urban development. "La Fabrique du Caire Moderne" is a collaboration between l'Institut français d’archéologie orientale (Ifao, Cairo),  L’information visuelle et textuelle en histoire de l’art : nouveaux terrains, corpus, outils – InVisu   (CNRS, INHA, Paris), and the History Department of Duke University (Durham NC, USA). The project co-directors are Prof. Mercedes Volait (Invisu, CNRS) and Prof. Adam Mestyan (Duke University). The project will make use of the "Max Karkegi" photographic collection, one of the richest photographic collections on 19th and 20th century Egypt.