The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

  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.