THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES INSTITUTE EXPERIENCE
To end this lovely journey based on the ENGL 256D (Doing Digital Humanities) taught by Dr. Najla Jarkas, my teammates and I decided to attend this year’s Digital Humanities Institute- Beirut event that took place at the American University of Beirut. This year, DHI-B’s theme revolved around “Consolidating Local, Regional, International, and Consortial Collaborations in Digital Humanities Communities.”
Figure1: DHI wordpress page https://dhibeirut.wordpress.com/
Several long and short workshops were held such as the Text Analysis, Zetero, Stylometry, Crowdsourcig and many more. We decided to sign up for the WikiAuthor workshop delivered by Dr. Alberto Haddad who had taught us how to create and set-up our own Wikipedia page which is a “multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of openly editable content”(Wikipedia, 2019). Many aspects and keynotes were discussed during the session to which we found very useful and had no clue of.
As mentioned by Dr. Haddad, Wikipedia is based on collaborative work whereby anyone can jump in and edit the information on the Wiki pages or even create a page. All you need in order to setup your own Wiki page is the internet and an editorial device. When you want to use Wikipedia make sure that the article that you are reading or using in your research is a good one meaning well-written, balanced, neutral, comprehensive, and verifiable/cited. So, you need to know the source of the information you are using. Take note that some Wikipedia articles might be a very new one written recently whereby it might not be a reliable source since it might need some time to develop. Wikipedia is actually good as a starting point for someone doing a research for instance.
Figure 2: Workshop session with Dr. Alberto Haddad on WikiAuthor
There are three main pillars which are very important especially when you want to edit or create a page using Wikipedia:
- you should be neutral,
- do not use any original research
- you must verify what you write
*The strengths of Wikipedia are as follows:
– it is continuously updated and dynamic
-there is minimum censorship
– anyone can contribute and edit Wiki pages
– you can see the history of the article that is who edited it and why it was edited
– amateurs and expert writers have the same weight
– vandalism or misinformation are reported and corrected
– hyperlinking
– has many languages
– direct publishing
-property right goes to the creator of the page
*The weaknesses of Wikipedia are as follows:
-anyone can edit
-vandalism is very easy to be committed, you can enter any page and write down information that might not be correct and hence mess up for instance a credible article
– many pages do not contain citations
-articles written on Wiki vary in quality
Wikipedian content:
- Edit page
- User page
- Talk page which is a discussion page
In order to upload media to your Wikipedia pages, you have to first upload the media first on Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons to which you’d get a code that you’ll insert in the image media section of Wikipedia.
Note: you can’t upload police booking photos on Wikipedia and u can’t place an image of someone that doesn’t know he/she is being photographed
During the Wikiauthor workshop, we managed to create our own Wikipedia account and set up a page along with adding some information by inserting any relevant data into the “infobox” and adding some media to make the page more attractive. Beyond that, it was indeed an interactive hands-on session that we most certainly found enjoyable, becoming finally Wikipedians/WikiAuthors!!
Figure 3: Workshop session with Dr. Alberto Haddad on WikiAuthor
After the workshop, we had lunch and got the chance to network with the organizers of the DHI and other colleagues coming from various countries in order to participate in this prominent event that adds so much of value to the Digital Humanities and work field. Ending our last semester before we graduate in June, with this extraordinary event established by the Digital Humanities Institute of Beirut, with the help of Dr. Najla Jarkas was a memorable experience.
PS: Thank you DHI organizing committee for these lovely bookmarks XD
Figure 4: DHI bookmarks 😀
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The Final Chapter for Orientalism!
As this semester comes to an end, our lovely team says there final tearful goodbyes with a final blog. It has been a joyous yet hectic ride towards the completion and presentation of our end-of-semester project but we pulled through! As you all know from our previous blogs, our semester’s theme this year is orientalism and we have been working tirelessly to present a project then correlate it to the theme. In this blog, we take you with us through the timeline since the idea of our project, then through the stages of thinking and visits to the archives and then finally to the presentation and writing of this blog!
Our project aimed to display the interrelationship between AUB students back in the 20th century and their foreign professors through the analysis of the student magazines at the university archives. What did they think of them? Did they take any to be their idol? Was there a religious barrier? A gender one? These are only some of the questions we thought of before getting down to business and researching the material handed down to us by the university archives! Why this topic you might say. Well, given that we are students of the same university, we would like to know if there were any similarities between us and them. Did we have the same thought process? Similar interests maybe in art, science, literature? This is the general thought process. These questions led the way in our research through the archives and the digitized magazines.
Because the Students magazine/Student Union Gazette is a broad collection at the AUB Archives, we have decided amongst ourselves to divide the work as follows:
Lyne: reviews 2-3 interesting publications of students in the gazette that have been digitized to see how the general interaction has been with specifically female students and their foreign professors. Did religion play a role in how female students talked and worked with their professors? Was there any interaction at all? These questions are meant to feed into the large umbrella theme: Orientalism. I also aim to see if my current generation’s views of the westerners has transformed or if we agree with what has been written over 100 years ago
Hiba: reviews 2-3 publications of students in the gazette. She tries to find the following: How have the students described their foreign professors? How have their attitudes changed throughout the years towards the occident? To better visualize such patterns, word clouds will be formed to address the frequency of the words that seem to be recurring throughout the years.
Roy: reviews 2-3 publications of students in the gazette that are present in the archives in order to analyze the respective/foreign professors’ interaction with their students. This would help me capture the thoughts of professors at a specific period and compare it through time (1899-1912). One area of focus would be: Did gender play an important detriment regarding the teachers interactions with students? How did this disparity unfold through time? These questions are meant to feed into the large umbrella theme: Orientalism. In fact, this concept would allow me to better understand how our interactions with each other impacted how the Occident view us.
Huda: reviews 2-3 publications of students in the gazette that have been digitized to perceive how the type of interaction was with male students and their foreign male professors throughout their university years. Would male foreign teachers and male students interact closer than females or not? Is their relationship an impersonal or interpersonal one? She was hoping to find answers to these queries in the students.
The above was our game plan. But unfortunately this didn’t go as hoped due to time constraints and our limited knowledge on the new DH tools such as AntConc. OCR, and GIMP. In addition, these tools required a lot of time to be implemented. For example, OCR-ing the entire collection of magazines at the university’s archives would take a minimum of 5 years and that project needs funding. So given these circumstances, we needed a new game plan. Huda and Lyne took the task of textual analysis of the magazines while Roy and Hiba took 20 plus pictures, doodles, and paintings to analyze. The outcome project is now published on OMEKA, as shown in the below screenshot from our website, under this following link: https://english256.omeka.net/about
Figure 1: Screenshot image from the “About” of the Project
This project was a success! However, this final wrapped up project didn’t come along smoothly as we ran through many difficulties. As a group, we have faced some difficulties in choosing our topic. At first, we decided to explore the translations of the Arabian Nights, which is actually a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales taking place during the Islamic Golden Age. After condensed research, we found that this specific topic was limited and that we weren’t able to find useful material to be explored at AUB archives. Based on these findings, we have changed our genre several times until finally deciding to explore the Students magazine/Student Union Gazette. We were able to discover this topic with the help of our professor Dr. Najla Jarkas which has been a great support ever since. Moreover, while conducting our research at AUB libraries, we found it hard to collect all the necessary information and classify it due to the fact that most of the material needed was not digitized. Luckily, with the help of AUB Librarians we were able to sort the information needed and come up with a great timeline representing the differences between the Occident and the Orient.
Figure 2: A doodle from the student magazines
We believe that based on our work, the next batch of students should continue exploring the differences between Orient and Occident represented in the Student Union Gazette. By doing so, they would be able to conduct an analysis on how the views of the Occident changed in regards to the Orient throughout time and vice versa. This would allow us to have a better understanding on how specific events and our interactions with each other impacted how the Occident view us nowadays. This work has been based on distant reading! and it is very important for future students who want to work on student magazines to look deeper and find different research questions because the magazines are enriched with several topics under everyday life themes! Maybe assess opposing opinions in religion, music, elections, debates, and more! How is our thinking different or similar to the Occident and how has that shaped our life as students at AUB. We also suggest the use of GIMP, OCR and different DH tools that help analyze and distant read these magazines.
Acknowledgments:
Many thanks go to our professor and advisor Dr. Najla Jarkas who has bared with us through the entire semester and helped in beautifying the final outcome which is now accessible on OMEKA (link in the blog) to those of you who are interested to access it! Also, many thanks to Mr. Alberto Haddad who helped introduce us to OMEKA. All the gratitude to the amazing team that made this happen!
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GIMPY WORLD
Have you ever taken a picture and just wish to edit it? Maybe brighten the image or crop yourself because you don’t like how you look in the picture…Well that can be done using many platforms but today we have a special one we would like to introduce to you fellow readers!
We all know what photoshop is, but allow us to present GIMP! Last week during our visit to the E- Classroom we had a presentation by Mrs. Vera Al Ashkar and Mrs. Donna Rajeh. These two specialists gave us two full hours on the several techniques we can use while using GIMP. This image editor has many tools that let you perform a large variety of tasks. The most used tools for image editing are:
- Selection and Transform tools (Rectangle select, Ellipse select, Magic Wand, Free select, and Select by color)
- Cut an object to remove background (you can make your background transparent, or change its color)
- Move (Used to move layers, selections, paths and texts. This adds an exquisite design to your projects)
- Layers (how to add layers and move them around)
- Cropping images in different shapes and sizes
- Rotating texts, images, cropped images and more
- Scaling tool which can be used to adjust the form and size of the image that is selected
- Flipping Tool (changing the orientation of the image like flipping pages on your book)
- Image Color Enhancement (Photos with clear, brilliant, and natural colors are always more attractive! That is why you can play with brightness, saturation, Hue, and more using this advantage)
- Processing Images (most exciting part! Please see the figure below from the workshop presentation)
Figure 1: The images change after removing noise and dust using GIMP
So we have given you what GIMP can do but we still did not provide you with a proper definition, so here goes nothing! GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program, it is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OSX, Windows and more operating systems. Most importantly, It is free software! Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with flexible sophisticated tools in order to transform images into unique and aesthetic creations.
This GIMP software tool has indeed captured our attention were we have decided that it’ll be a great idea to utilize this beneficial advanced editing tool in our digital humanities project concerning exploring the Student Magazines of AUB from the 1890s till the 1930s linked to the theme around orientalism. We noticed when we went to the AUB archives that the magazines that were published by students, for instance The Student Union Gazette had many photographs, paintings, and doodlings. In order to better present such media into unique pieces of artwork to be placed later on in OMEKA as an art exhibition, we need to play with GIMP and the tools it offers. Our exhibition needs to include clear, bright, and noise-free images for us to be able to present it appealingly in our final year project.
Another tool we learned more about is OCR, which stands for Optical character recognition. It is a software technology that enables us to convert scanned document into documents with “live text,” aka readable, searchable text that you can change, copy, edit and basically do anything you regularly do to text. There are two methods used for OCR: Matrix matching (the simpler and more common) and feature extraction:
1- Matrix Matching compares what our OCR software detects as a character with a library of character templates. The OCR software matches that image to its corresponding ASCII character.
2-Feature Extraction is OCR that uses computer intelligence to look for general features such as open areas, closed shapes, diagonal lines, line intersections, etc. It’s a much more versatile method, but it has more requirements for a successful outcome, such as a clean, straight image and minimum 300-dpi resolution. Matrix matching can still work well on less-than-ideal images and it’s what’s most common in PDF software like PhantomPDF.
Advantages of OCR:
From faster searches and easier editing to saving digital and physical storage space, we encounter many benefits to using OCR software to turn document images into searchable, editable text:
Au revoir retyping –No need to retype old documents, we can easily convert those image files into searchable, editable text via OCR.
Speedy digital searches – By converting scanned text into a word processing file, OCR allows us to search through documents using keywords or phrases.
Typing new text – If we need that image of a document to function like real text, where we can add new paragraphs, copy and paste, edit out an old reference, etc., OCR lets us do it. It’s ideal for everything from updating contracts to making changes to our archive.
Saving space –It would allow us to save documents as PDF files by scanning them with the confidence that the OCR software will let us retrieve any of the text we need to work with.
Accessibility –OCR software can help turn books, magazines and other printed documents into accessible files that we can listen to with the help of a combination of word processing software and computer voice-over utilities.
Figure 2: Cartoon representation of OCR
To conclude, in our final year project, we intend to use the VietOCR that will help us transform the textual pictures into actual texts whereby we can manipulate the context converting it into plain text. This modification would allow us to embed the texts written by AUB students into DH software tools like Voyant, Palladio, and AntConc in order to perform distant reading and textual analysis to uncover the hidden trends and relationships when it comes to the word choices used by students to depict their foreign professors and how they, the foreign professors, viewed their students! This is the thread we intend to follow under our “Orientalism” theme this year.
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A visit to AUB Libraries Archives
When we first started this journey on orientalism, we were interested to explore the several translations of the Arabian Nights because of the curiosity that ate at us to learn and discover more. But that did not last for long. We changed our minds several times from translations to fantasy to philosophy because we were not deciding on a final genre to work on and, with all honesty, it took a toll on our confidence in achieving the course requirements and learning objectives. Let us tell you what happened in this short informative blog!
It all started on Thursday, February 28, 2019 when Mr. Alberto Haddad, the American University of Beirut’s librarian and Omeka Specialist, visited our digital humanities class to talk about the university’s archives. Long story short: our topic on fantasy in the orient yielded zero results in the archival search engines. It was devastating to not find a single source we could use to explore Fantasy in the orient. Our course instructor and Mr. Alberto stayed with us after long class hours to find a different topic. This is basically how we ended up with the topic of exploring the Student Magazines in AUB! We were unsure of it at first but we trusted our instructor’s intuition.
Mr. Alberto gave a sneak peak on the systematic functions of the online archives and how to access material using an option called “finding aids” (Figure 1). Basically this introduction was a preliminary preparation process for the visit to the archives the following week. It is here that Mr. Alberto and Dr. Najla, our course instructor found a topic for us that we were not sure of at first because we did not know how can we research the topic, how to analyze such material for a final year presentation. In general, we didn’t know if this project is broad enough for us to explore and integrate in our projects on OMEKA. This all changed after the visit to the archives as you will see while reading on.
Before we move on to the Archive visit, the team decided to see the relation between students and their foreign professors. How did they interact? How did each party perceive the other? How is that related to oriental thinking? How has Orientalism been depicted from 1899-1934? Did their perceptions change with time? How is that portrayed in the Student Union Gazette? We wanted to see how that would work and from research before our visit we found these books digitized by the archives.
Figure 1: The digitized Student Gazettes
We have taken a screenshot of the Archives and Special Collections and as seen below we can search for posters also along the years on student-foreign professor relationships and how they have been formed.
Figure 2: The AUB Archives and Special Collections Division’s Finding Aid
Mrs Samar Mikati- Kaissi revealed hidden treasures of AUB that we basically did not know existed. The archives and special collection division of the university library have hoarded over the years more than 1,400 manuscripts; several hundred rare books; 8,500 volumes of theses, projects, and dissertations going back to 1906; 5,000 posters; 800 postcards; 1,900 maps; 50,000 photographs; and 700 linear feet of archival material, including papers of famous intellectuals like Constantine Zurayq. In short, history is truly at our fingertips and this saddens us because we just figured this out when we are months away from graduation.
The archives are divided into 7 sections:
- Generalities (annual ceremonies, Commencement, Founder’s Day, student strikes and more…)
- President Perspective papers (as early as the founding father Daniel Bliss’s perspectives and correspondence)
- Faculties (History of AUB Faculties)
- Students (student activities, protests, petitions)
- Alumni (documents Alumni branches, class reunion)
- Related bodies (groups that help the university and fundraise projects on campus, scholarships, president’s club)
- Arab Scholars (papers of AUB professors that have activities beyond AUB)
The Special collections found at the library are:
- The Salam Family Collection (archives of Saeb Salam, photo collection of the father, prime minister Tammam Salam photo collection)
- Political posters (Palestinian issue, political journals, Lebanese parties)
- Art/AUB posters (Lebanese scenery, Jamil Hamoudi’s art collection from brochures to posters and more)
- Nasri Khattar’s Unified Arab Font collection
- Collection of maps (Lebanese maps, Arab region, and world maps from topographical to geographical mappings)
- Photo Collection (100,000 photographs in total! The earliest picture was in 1866, Blatchford collection, and Moore Collection, Comics Collection)
- Issa Iskandar Al-Maalouf collection (journalist, scholars, manuscripts, photographs, postcards all on Issa)
- Theses Dissertation Collection from Students!
We learned more about the archives and our research topic! We ended up finding interesting student opinions published in the students magazine and also we had insight on their view of their professors, how classes were, how they interact with one another and a lot more. This is just a preliminary look at the topic, we cannot wait to have a deeper, more indulging experience while researching! Stay Tuned for the next blogs and as we build up our final project. Here is a sneak peak of what we found from our research just to show you how excited we are!
The collection is arranged in four chronological series:
Series I: Magazines of 1899, 1900 1909 (45 titles in Arabic, English and French)
Series II: Magazines of 1911- 1920 (5 titles in English and Arabic)
Series III: Magazines of 1923- 1928 (12 titles in English, French, and Armenian)
Series IV: Magazines of 1929- 1934 (3 titles in English and French)“ (Archives and Special Collections Department, American University of Beirut Beirut, Lebanon, 2018)
See you in the next blog!
References:
AUB Libraries (2008) The Student Union Gazette of The American University of Beirut. Retrieved on March 13, 2019 from: http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/jafet/gazette/index.html
Students’ Magazines, AA: 4.2.1, Box no. , File no. , Archives and Special Collections, American University of Beirut. Retrieved on March 13, 2019 from: https://web.aub.edu.lb/libraries/asc/Common%20Documents/AUB%20Students’%20Magazines%20Collection.pdf
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Orient VS Occident: A Different Perspective
It’s good to be back discovering yet another interesting topic through digital humanities. This semester, in our ENGL 256D course we will be exploring a captivating theme known as “Orientalism”. My first blog will be an introduction about this literary and cultural movement and its relevancy as students in the 21st century.
Source:RationalWiki
First of all, let me start by defining what is Orientalism? “Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. Edward W. Said, in his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, defined it as the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.” According to Said, Orientalism dates from the period of European Enlightenment and colonization of the Arab World. Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or “rescue”. Examples of early Orientalism can be seen in European paintings and photographs and also in images from the World’s Fair in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Source:Orientalism- SOUQ
This idea of Orientalism is not a new theory, but one that continues to permeate in the world. Orientalism may have been an idea that originated with the Orient as the focus, but it is not a static idea that is unchanging. It has changed and developed over time, but it is still extremely significant. Orientalism is a type of “thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the “orient and (most of the time) “the Occident.” It is an idea or view that was created to understand and separate the Orient from the West, mainly Britain, France and the United states. The Orient and Orientalism is a view that was created by outsiders. There has actually not been an exact concept of the orient that is pure and unconditional. Since this idea was a creation by outsiders there is a certain amount of bias towards the Orient and how it was understood compared to the western world. Orientalism is a field of study that was created and its subject matter is something learned. This is important to keep in mind because it is a learned field of study that can continue to change and develop. As students, it is important to learn what exactly are these these stereotypes, their origin and the reasons that led to these conclusions. In this way, we could better understand how others “view” us nowadays. However, one question is asked: How have travelers documented their experiences in the early 1800s in order to be able to generate such biases?
One way that was used in order to record these “differences” between the Orient and the Occident was through Oral History. In fact, Oral history is the systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experiences. Oral historians attempt to verify their findings, analyze them, and place them in an accurate historical context. Moreover, they are also concerned with storage of their findings for use by later scholars. In oral history projects, an interviewee recalls an event for an interviewer who records the recollections and creates a historical record. Oral history depends upon human memory and the spoken word. The means of collection can vary from taking notes by hand to elaborate electronic aural and video recordings. However, the human life span puts boundaries on the subject matter that we collect with oral history. We can only go back one lifetime, so our limits move forward in time with each generation.
Source: OSU Libraries
Based on the information and the discussions established regarding Orientalism, my team and I found it eye-catching and prominent to explore the translations of the Arabian Nights which is actually a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales taking place during the Islamic Golden Age. This book has been written in Arabic, originally called “أَلْف لَيْلَة وَلَيْلَة” that is “Alf Layla Wa Layla” which has been written by many anonymous authors. This book has been translated by many authors in many languages from Turkish to Russian and so on. As a team, we thought about examining the English translations of the Arabian Nights and look at how for instance the word choices and literary style of each translator changed overtime. This could be achieved through frequently reoccurring words and the level of contribution of each author/translator, since not many had translated the entire book but rather handpicked out the stories and conflated them into different volumes as opposed to the original version. In fact, famous stories such as New Arabian Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights” by E. Dixon, and “The Book of the Thousand and One Nights” by John Payne have different wording. We will rely on digitals tools such as : Voyant Tools, Google My Maps, TopoText… in order to come up with a better analysis, applying a distant reading.
Source:One Thousand And One Nights-Amazon
Roy Saad 