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 m...

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.

We recently came across this interesting and extensive initiative by "The Maydan" . Below is a description of this ongoing project as it appeared on their website. The Maydan is proud to introduce a new initiative highlighting digital resources and projects in the field of Islamic Studies. Included in this roundup are manuscripts collections, digitized manuscripts, and manuscripts catalogues from universities and libraries around the world. *This is an ongoing project – if you know of similar resources that we may have missed  please email us at publish@themaydan.com . **In the near future we plan to add to this page essays from scholars who have engaged these manuscript collections/catalogues. Collections Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI ) The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition, Institute for Advanced Study The Sinai Palimpsests Project Mingana Collection, University of Birmingham The Minassian Collection of Qur’anic Manuscripts, Brown University ...

Shehab Ismail, Postdoctoral Fellow in Department III at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, has been awarded 30,000 USD by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) for his project Digital History of British Colonial Cairo: Media and the Potentialities of History. The project aims at developing a site to publish electronic articles that use various audio-visual media to reconstruct an understanding of the history of Cairo under British occupation. It is based on the employment of media and maps in order to achieve two objectives: 1) overcome publication barriers that prevent the optimal use of the possibilities of Digital Media, 2) provide a new style of critical historical writing about Cairo to readers in Arabic.

The Vienna Corpus of Arabic Varieties (VICAV) was set up with two main purposes in mind: to serve as a virtual research platform targeting the particular needs of Arabic dialectology and to serve as a test bed for newly developed text technological methodologies and tools. As part of these efforts, it was designed as a means to promote the efficient exchange of ideas and experiences in an active international community. Being located at the border between areal and corpus linguistics, the aim is to gather varying digital language resources for a number of different localities. The description of the different varieties will hinge on language profiles, concise and uniformly structured form sheets that offer information on the research history, available literature, salient grammatical features etc. of particular varieties. VICAV makes accessible bibliographies, dictionaries, glossaries, and different types of transcribed texts. The project aims at providing a...

The project Corpus Coranicum of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2007-2024) is exploring the Qur'an from three different angles: (1) Textual History: databases of ancient manuscripts and variant readings give insights into its textual history, (2) Qur’an in History: a documentation of texts from the cultural and religious environment outlines Late Antique features in the text, (3) History of the Text: a literary-chronological commentary studies the Qur’an as a developing speech proclaimed during more than 20 years to a changing audience. The digital publication is also providing other digital research tools like its font ("Coranica") and a text concordance.