“Open access” is any resource you don’t have to pay for, that is available online and that has less obstacles to copying and using material – in short, anything that is available for all.1 As a movement in information sciences, it has been praised, but in our particular contexts, in mine as someone who lives in the Arabic-speaking world, I wonder about its limitations. What does “available for all” truly mean?
What open access is can be defined by cultural factors, like language, history and even the significance of computer literacy. I presented on this with N.A. Mansour at the Digital Orientalisms Twitter Conference in 2020 in both Arabic and English. But we thought a visual medium might help us provoke thought on this issue even more.
Alternative text is also available for each comic panel.
In light of recent events in Lebanon, we want to encourage you to donate to support domestic workersvia Egna Legna, an Ethiopian domestic worker-run organization based in Beirut Lebanon, which has over the past three years assisted domestic workers including victims of horrible abuses to the best of its ability.We also recommend donating to Beit el Baraka.Use this tool to find more places that need donations.
If you’re an Arabist, think about the digital library or archive catalogues you use and then try to count the number that have interfaces and data available in Arabic. There are few in Arabic, although there are more catalogues and tools that are in Turkish. In addition, the design of these resources often is adapted without much alteration from tools produced for European-language materials for European-language audiences. It dismisses even the possibility that other intellectual histories rooted in different contexts function differently and require different things from their organizational standards; it also dismisses the notion that technologies are neutral and that they are inclusive.
A doorway in the IDEO featuring mashrabiyya (Photo Credit: N.A. Mansour)
The Arabic intellectual tradition is built around commentaries all expressing different and often diverging opinions, although they are often tied to the same text. So in order to study, for example كتاب سيبويه Kitāb Sībawayh, you need to be familiar with existing critical editions of the text. You might also want the commentaries written on it. You also naturally want the secondary sources on it as well: Arabic journal articles and monographs, as well as those written in other languages. Your institution’s standard catalogue might not be as much help here. You need a catalogue built to these bibliographic purposes. The AlKindi catalogue, developed by the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) is the best solution to this problem of needing research tools in Arabic, built for Arabophone audiences with the Arabic intellectual tradition in mind. It’s also the solution to our bibliographical problems, essentially letting you browse online more effectively. It’s not perfect yet, namely in that it does not include every Arabic book ever written but each day, the catalogue becomes a stronger engine, as more data is added to it and as more people use it; it is often the first result you find when using a standard internet search engine to look for a text, like, say كتاب سيبويه, Kitāb Sībawayh. The cataloguing team has needed to expand multiple times to accommodate the work-load and under the direction of Mohamad Malchouch, it is full-steam ahead for the project. Here, we’ll be giving you an introduction to using the system, as well as a crash-course in cataloguing standards.
TYPE Lab (Credit to Sarah Shebl and the TYPE Lab design team).
While historians have made efforts to document the Arabic script from both historical and visual perspectives, few have made the information and resources on the Arabic script accessible to the general public. Bahia Shehab is an artist, activist and academic who has recently founded TYPE Lab at the American University in Cairo (AUC). TYPE Lab is dedicated to promoting the documentation and development of the Arabic script in both Arabic and English, as well as to encouraging conversation around its history and development. Here, she describes her team’s efforts to create a project that reproduces and documents over 70,000 historical and contemporary Arabic letters in the Visual Encyclopedia of Arabic Letters, a TYPE Lab project, and make them open access so that artists, designers, historians and academics can learn more about the letters’ aesthetic features as well as their chronological information. While the TYPE Lab website is underway, the Facebook and Instagram pages are regularly used to share Arabic letters as well as events that host various designers, historians, publishers, academics and other speakers who have experience with the Arabic script. As this project unfolds over the coming years, we look forward to how Shehab and her team will have developed this project and taken it further.
(Questions by Marwa Gadallah, with contributions by N.A. Mansour)
By Torsten Wollina (MSC Cofund Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin)
There are several noteworthy initiatives in Germany that are pushing the boundaries of #openaccess to both sources and secondary literature. Only recently, a joint project of several German university and research libraries has received funding for creating an online union catalogues for manuscripts in the Arabic script held by those libraries (named Orient digital). Leipzig University is home to the long-term project Bibliotheca Arabica which aims at a reassessment of Arabic literary history by putting it in conversation with manuscript studies. Unofficially, it has already been described as Brockelmann 2 (or 2.0). The digitization project Translatio at Bonn University is currently identifying periodicals in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish published between 1860 and 1945 and makes them accessible online. Yet another initiative is the Bamberger Islam-Enzyklopädie headed by Patrick Franke. It provides a framework which aims at engaging scholars to disseminate their expertise on Wikipedia in German. Through this encyclopedia, authored Wikipedia articles become visible as citable publications.
At the moment, by far the largest initiative towards #openaccess is hosted by the University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle). It offers two main online resources: MENALIB is the virtual specialist library but I will be focusing here on the online repository MENAdoc because it is, in my opinion, a truly unique treasure trove of primary and secondary sources.
Ever since podcasting hit the scene in the early 2000s, there has been no shortage of content on the Middle East, North Africa, the Islamicate world, and on Muslims. We’ve assembled a list here –subject to eventual updates and suggestions– of podcasts on history, current events, and culture from the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and the Islamic(ate) world more generally. We have also included a few other podcasts on Muslim cultural and intellectual matters. This list is by no means exhaustive and we look forward to developing it more: you can DM us suggestions on Twitter or Facebook and you can email us or comment below.
For those of you who are uninitiated in the ways of podcasts, a basic guide: you can either listen to them streamed from their sites on your computer or tablet or you can download a podcast catcher app (iPhones come preloaded with the Podcast app). Many are uploaded to Soundcloud (which is both a website and an app). Other podcast apps include Overcast, Stitcher, Anchor, Breaker, PodTail, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Once you’ve installed the apps, search by podcast title (or episode title) to find what you’re looking for. You can choose to subscribe or just listen to individual episodes (either via downloads or streaming) If you are having problems finding the podcasts on your podcast catcher of choice, please visit the podcast’s homepage to see if it is only available on certain platforms.
We at Hazine love our lists. So hot off the heels of our visual resource guide and our regularly updated blog-list, we have a list of online resources to share with you all: this is where you can find primary sources online or resources to help you get at primary sources. An earlier incarnation of this list is here, written by Zachary Foster. We’re including links to digitized Islamic manuscripts, digitized periodicals, digitized books, oral history repositories, online syllabi and material history archives, all relevant to Middle East, North African, Islamicate world, and Islamic studies. Note while many of these are open access, some are not. Standard rules apply: this is not a comprehensive list so tweet at us or email us and we’ll add things to our semi-annual updates to this list.
Let’s face it: every publication is better with images. Whether it’s a presentation, a blog post, a book, or just a paper, images engage an audience instantly. The internet is flush with images from Islamic art, architecture, and society, but reliable sources (with credit information) are more difficult to track down. So we’ve done it for you! Here are some of the best sites for finding credited visual resources for Islamic, Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Feel free to suggest more in the comments and we’ll update the list! Note this list is specifically focused on images and visual resources, but not necessarily manuscripts (for a guide to online manuscript collections, look at Evyn Kropf’s list here).
We recently tweeted out some of our favorite blogs to follow: we threw out a couple of names you probably know and some you might not have had the chance to follow. Then our followers (and some of the people we tagged) tweeted back at us some of their favorites (particular shout-outs to Rich Heffron, Hind Makki and M Lynx Qualey). Here it is, in list form, if you don’t follow us on Twitter. Please either comment bellow on your favorites, tweet at us, or email us at hazineblog@gmail.com and we’ll update the list as we go along!
