The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

Registration is now open for the Digital Humanities Institute-Beirut 2019 . This is an opportunity for all those who would like to learn more about DH and all the new trends in this nascent field. The American University of Beirut has hosted two previous rounds in 2015 and 2017. This institute is an excellent platform for researchers and specialists in the field of DH from the Middle East or working on projects revolving around the region.

The British Library is starting round two of their Optical Character Recognition (OCR) contest, and are calling on anyone with OCR software to apply. More details can be found here: https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/02/automatic-transcription-of-historical-arabic-scientific-manuscripts-round-2.html In the RBSCL Digital Collections, the lack of quality OCR software has hampered research use as well as some potentially interesting projects. Most notably, AUC's student newspaper The Caravan (aka Caravan, Campus Caravan, Caravan Weekly, and AUC Review )  has been published in English and Arabic since its founding in 1925. Unfortunately the Arabic OCR text is generally not as accurate or user friendly as the English, thus reducing some of the usefulness. Additionally, it could be interesting to study how Arabic and English word usage changes over time, but without good Arabic OCR it would require a lot of manual entry of data. Hopefully the British Library contest makes

Have you ever wondered what made up the headlines in Egypt at the turning of the twentieth century? Dr. Will Hanley , Associate professor, History Department at Florida State University has been studying cosmopolitan Alexandria through the "Egyptian Gazette" one of Egypt's most popular foreign newspapers at the late nineteenth and early twentieth century , which he digitizes and marks up (!) with his classes.You can know more about his work at his blog . Dr. Hanley's work is an excellent example of incorporating digital humanities in the classroom and providing students with interesting new skills.