The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest

The Middle East Digital Humanities Digest is a blog created by the Digital Humanities program at the American University in Cairo Libraries & Learning technologies. AUC is a leading English-language, American-accredited institution of higher education and center of the intellectual, social, and cultural life of the Arab world. Its community of students, parents, faculty and staff, trustees, alumni, and other generous sponsors represent more than 60 countries. The University stands as a crossroads for the world’s cultures and a vibrant forum for reasoned argument, spirited debate, and understanding across the diversity of languages, facilities, and human experiences. MEDHD Vision: Quality guide of content for digital humanities projects and content in Egypt and the Middle East. MEDHD Audience: (Our ideal reader & Bloggers) MEDHD  blog intends to be a space for digital humanists, librarians, scholars, and researchers, and students who show great interest or experience...

Mohamed Amer, MA, Global cultures, Bologna University, 2019    There is no doubt that the first step in decolonizing any cultural heritage object is to re-document it in a way that is appropriate to its historical context. Consequently, digital documentation has a significant role in the decolonization process, since historical contexts can be rewritten better during digital documentation. Hence, it comes the vital role of Linked Open Data in recontextualizing the history of heritage belongings by using cultural heritage management software, which is based on LOD.     Since culture by nature is a cross border and interlinked, the value of Linked Open Data is very high and also very challenging. Rosetta Stone was a key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian civilization by linking the three writings Ancient Egyptian language, Demotic, and Ancient Greek to each other. Linked Open Data can perform the same function as it connects the different resources, rep...

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.

Jāmiʻal-Makhṭūṭāt al-Islāmīyah is a site that compiles and offers direct links to an extensive rich collection of Arabic and Islamic Manuscripts. One can easily browse the collection either by manuscript title or by location through the name of the institution that houses the manuscript. The interface is only available in Arabic which can be considered an obstacle, yet this project is quite useful and worth a try. 

# dariahTeach is an open source, multilingual, community-driven platform for high quality teaching and training materials for the digital arts and humanities. If you are familiar with digital humanities then you must have heard of terms like text encoding and TEI. In case you are intrigued by these terms and want to learn more about them and may be take some first steps towards doing some text encoding yourself then you should check this series of educational videos provided by Daria Teach about "Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts, and TEI Encoding. They are extremely helpful.

According to a recent post from the "Library of Congress International Collections" Facebook page: The African & Middle Eastern Division has digitized the Eltaher Collection’s 100+ Palestinian Pamphlets!  These documents relate, in some detail, to the British Mandate in Palestine (1923-1948). They cover the impact of the 1917 Balfour declaration and the Mandate on Palestine, and the way in which they enabled the Zionist movement to establish the Palestinian state in 1948. Read more about the collection and the digitized pamphlets here:  https://www.loc.gov/…/elta her-colle…/about-this-collection/… .  Muhammad Ali Eltaher (1896-1974) was an author, journalist, and newspaper editor. The Eltaher Collection consists of more than 2,000 items in various formats, including books, pamphlets, photographs, personal correspondence, and newspaper clippings. Most of the collection is in Arabic, with some materials in English. The collection documents the history of the Arab wo...

Great news to lovers of the art of photography and particularly "Arab Photography" .  The Arab Image Foundation, Beirut’s pioneering non-profit archive of Middle Eastern photography, has launched an  online platform  that makes 22,000 images from the collection accessible and searchable for the first time. Read more at this article  from The Art Newspaper. Selim Abu Izzedine’s Portrait of a woman on a horse (1900s, Egypt) has been digitally converted from a gelatin silver negative on glass Faysal Abu Izzeddin Collection; Courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation

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...