#PalestineToday: Join in Marking the Nakba in the Time of Coronavirus

What is #PalestineToday?

#PalestineToday is the social media hashtag created to encourage Palestinians to share their Nakpa stories by sharing their place of birth on Palestine Today interactive map website. 

Palestinian Today is a project made by visualizing Palestine (VP). VP creates data-driven tools to advance a factual, rights-based narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. This project involves researchers, designers, technologists, and communications specialists work in partnership with civil society actors to amplify their impact and promote justice and equality.

VP was launched in 2012. VP is the first portfolio of Visualizing Impact (VI), an independent, non-profit laboratory for innovation at the intersection of data science, technology, and design.

Here is a video on How to navigate  Palestine Today interactive map and share your story. 

Tip: Use Your Mouse Scroll while navigating interactive Map

Why #PalestineToday?

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the #Nakba (Arabic: النكبة‎, al-Nakbah, literally "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm") is the story of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs about half of prewar Palestine's Arab population — fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. 

Between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were sacked during the war, while urban Palestine was almost entirely extinguished. The term nakba also refers to the period of war itself and events affecting Palestinians from December 1947 to January 1949.

The above information is considered general knowledge or part of the story told in numbers; however, #PalestineToday is stories told on social media by natives, people who lived, or have been living with Nakba.  It is a move towards decolonizing the narrative, so what do we mean by "Decolonization". 

Decolonization is the process of the undoing of colonialism. In extreme circumstances, it is considered a war of independence. When we attached the word 'Narrative', it is the conversation about the unequal representation of narrating history by the ‘foreign’ scholar and ‘native’ claimants. Simply, it is the act of native scholars or people who lived the history to tell their stories instead of being told about. 

Read more about Digital Humanities and decolonization of cultural heritage by Mohamed Amer 

Examples of #PalestineToday Stories Shared, so far: 

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How to Participate with #PalestineToday between NOW and May 15, 2020: 

1. Visit the Palestine, Today interactive map to explore how the Nakba transformed the map of Palestine, featuring data on 1,196 localities.

2. Share the story of one village by hitting "share the story" when you reach the bottom of the page.