The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

Not pictured: The New World As AUC is in midst of celebrating its centennial this year, we thought it might be interesting to take a look at the diverse history of the student body. International Day has been a campus tradition for over thirty years, but since its founding in 1919 the students have come from a wide variety of backgrounds. To help illustrate that, we created a simple map charting the nationalities of students from 1927 to 1950. This data is from the AUC Board of Trustees' Meeting Minutes . Typical listing of students' "race": https://bit.ly/2WSIDnd Thankfully the OCR was quite good, and it was relatively simple to split data by commas and semicolons to create usable tables. Of course with any digital humanities project data cleanup is required; in this case there were sometimes divergent spellings of nationalities (e.g. "Iraquian", "Iraqian", "Iraqi", "Mesopotamian"). More challenging was the philo...

This project was written by Elizabeth Claire Saylor, Visiting Assistant Professor, Middlebury College; and compiled by: Marjorie Stevens, Senior Researcher, Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies Between 1880 and 1914, roughly one third of the total population of Greater Syria emigrated to Egypt and North and South America, or the mahjar (Khater, Inventing Home , 8). During the same period, Syrian and Lebanese women in various diasporic communities emerged as leading figures of the Arabic literary and cultural renaissance, or the nahḍa.  As novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists, and as founders of influential literary salons, women’s organizations, and the very first Arab women’s periodicals, women from Greater Syria were key contributors to the Arabic literary awakening. Despite their notable contributions to literature, journalism, and feminism, these women and their writings have been largely overlooked. By turning the spotlight on the ...

FLAME is a collaborative digital humanities project, centered at Princeton University but involving scholars around the world who gather and organize the data in FLAME’s database. FLAME aims to reconstruct the late antique and early medieval economy using large quantities of data over a large spatial and chronological range. The current goals are to gather information about over a million published coins from Ireland to India. FLAME will then provide scholars with tools to analyze this information. We are proud at AUC library that our colleague Peter Philps , Director for Collections, contributed to this project with his privately compiled Early Islamic collection dataset.  You can read more about the project here or try their application .