The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

The text encoding of this French manuscript that dates back to Napoleon's expedition to Egypt was undertaken as part of the American University in Cairo's DH program series of pilot projects. The manuscript is written by the French military officer E. L. F. Hauet describing Napoleon's military campaign in Egypt. It is the first of four manuscripts that cover the Battles of Abu Kir (land, not sea), Heliopolis, the siege of Cairo, and the Desaix's march to Upper Egypt. The transcription of the original text and the text encoding have been prepared by Mark Muehlhaeusler and Abdel Aziz Galal. Text encoding has been done using "Oxygen XMl editor" (XML Lite). Basic encoding, capturing lexical information only. All hyphenation, punctuation, and variant spellings have been retained. Formatting and layout information preserved to the maximum extent possible. Capitalization has been normalized to the st

Mohamed Habib a scholar studying Digital Huminities at Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna has just created DHINAR , the first Digital journal in Arabic language for Digital Humanities. "Very pleased to launch the first Digital journal in Arabic language for Digital Humanities DHINAR "Digital Humanities in Arabic". Our goal is to enrich the Arab ic content of digital humanities by creating a community for Arab digital humanists, students, and for the practitioners as well. The most important value of this project is to achieve the knowledge equality. The people who are interested in the digital domain, especially the digital human heritage are welcome to join the community! " يسرني أن اعلن عن اطلاق أول مجلة رقمية باللغة العربية مخصصة للعلوم الإنسانية الرقمية تهدف الى إثراء المحتوى العربي للعلوم الإنسانية الرقمية من خلال إنشاء مجتمع للباحثين في المجال الرقمي والطلاب والممارسين الرقميين العرب. وتعد القيمة الأهم لهذا المشروع هي تحقيق المساوا

My next foray into digital humanities ( you can read about mapping the nationalities of AUC students here ) involves the venerable students newspaper the Caravan (aka the AUC Review , Campus Caravan , and Caravan Weekly ). The first issue was published in 1925 and it is still going strong today. Currently, we have issues up to 1996 available in our Digital Library though some years are missing (either because of scanning issues or we don’t have them at all, in the latter case please let us know if you have copies). The Caravan has been bilingual through most of its history, though this project will focus on the English issues only. With the excellent work done by the digitization lab we have over 4,000 English pages scanned, and through ABBYY FineReader we’ve generated text files for each page, creating a corpus to explore. Unfortunately for some pages the text recognition leaves a lot to be desired; often this is caused by poor quality printing or ABBYY being confused.

The Omani ministry of Heritage and Culture has announced it is sharing more than 4,000 manuscripts electronically to researchers on its website . The manuscripts are distributed in four fields, focusing mostly on the humanities, Hadith, Quran, jurisprudence, history, literature, as well as astronomy, medicine and marine science.