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