« Growing Up, I Read A Lot. Partly Because I Loved It, And Partly Because There Wasn’t Much Else To

Beirut and I, we make love like war

« A man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall where a spiraling basilica of shadows was pierced by shafts of light from a high glass dome above us. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive, woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked. ‘Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.’ »

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

« Julian walks into the Duomo and a rush of cool air washes over him. There is a small group of students standing before the altar, and a few people are sitting in the pews. He finds a seat near the apse and rests his eyes briefly, before resuming his tour of the cathedral while listening to the Mahler symphony again on his headphones. Parts of the first movement have always struck him as discordant. Yet somehow the mess of interlocking notes works. It seems to him that the Gothic vaults and imposing columns of the cathedral share this quality of dissonance. He remembers vaguely something that Aidan once told him, that architecture could be likened to music; that music is, in turn, liquid architecture. And if music is a temporal art—the division and expansion of notes in time—that meant architecture, as petrified music, is frozen time. »

Christine Lai, Landscapes

Beirut’s stony Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral of Saint Elias.

It was initially built towards the end of the 18th century and reconstructed in 1849.

Style: Byzantine, baroque, Islamic

The only remaining Mameluke building in Beirut, Zawiyat Ibn Arraq.

Once a complete private madrasa, only the zawiya (prayer corner) remains of it.

Today, someone seemed to have made it their own prayer corner and unrolled a prayer rug inside.

Date: 1517- used till Ottoman times

Beautiful to see what we treat as “monuments” being reused as such. Do we glorify what is historical only because we know it’s historical? Do we love these stones only because we know they’re hundreds of years old? What’s so intrinsically beautiful about what’s historical?

Can we even call them monuments? Is it history? Is it present?

Christine Lai, Landscapes

« Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

And dance me to the end of love »

Leonard Cohen, Dance Me to the End of Love

My Women are Tabla & Qanoun by Nur Turkmani

Hey! Just happened upon this post and thought the list is really worth expanding as I’ve studied some DH myself!

Check out Around DH in 80 Days where there’s a list of 80 DH projects from around the world that were picked to be featured. You can also find their GoogleDocs spreadsheet for the full list of suggested projects. Their efforts to highlight global DH projects are ongoing, and they’ve created this new website as well!

Would also love to share one of my favorite digital projects called Diarna, a geomuseum documenting and mapping sites of Jewish heritage from all over SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and Central Asia!

And for those interested in learning about or studying different Arabic dialects, I want to share MADAR corpus which is a database collecting Arabic sentences as spoken from 25 Arab cities. This website details how to use it.

Cheers!

Digital Humanities is a really cool field.

It’s main goals is discovering how to use digital infrastructure and tools to do humanities research (linguistics, history, literature) and how to engage the general public in academic discourse of these topics.

From a historian's perspective this is very exciting as many people think history is boring or worse just names and dates. These tools and visualizations of history bring people to the forefront of history conversations and engage directly.

Not to mention these are very fun to play with. Video games for academic nerds.

Digital Humanities really encourages research and digital projects. It may be slowly becoming a passion of mine.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

Allow me to introduce with the Digital Humanities Forum at Miami University Oxford, Ohio. https://libguides.lib.miamioh.edu/c.php?g=1100099&p=8022726

Other universities host past digital humanities projects on their scholarly commons too:

Berkeley: https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/projects

https://orbis.stanford.edu/ Orbis is the interactive trade map of the Roman empire and is a very detailed digital humanities project. It's one of my personal favorites cause you can "Take walking tour to Constantinople"

Or perhaps you'd like to walk the silk road? http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/index.html.en

Image reading is very interesting too, this tool from google is what I I normal think of https://cloud.google.com/vision. The "Try the API feature" allows you to upload and analyze images to find descriptor terms. (Yes I hate google and AI, but I'm sorta okay with metadata for museum object files being made a bit AI, it's painstaking work and there are too many words and way of describing a freaking spoon.)

http://www.onodo.org/ Onodo allows network mapping and is a cool easy to use program. Check out the Gallery to find public published projects on the Mughals Emperors to Star wars.

Geospatial labs create digital products linked to maps and are also a form of digital humanities and is very applicable for the origins of an artifact and conceptualizing location. http://www.arcgis.com/ is a geospatial platform designed to make Story Maps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b2c6b618e7b24cebb4039ac59dc52f19

Makerspaces and 3-D modeling are also considered to be digital humanities as there is a digital component. So check out the Makerspace at your local library!

Omeka is a digital platform that can create very basic virtual exhibits and is a pain to work with (the backend is annoying as all get out, too many metadata slots) but kinda cool.

Virtual museum exhibits are also digital humanities!!! (I could easily make a series of posts about that) This runs the gambit from slides shows to video game like exhibits to videos of tours and click through tours. It's kinda a you name it it's a valid exhibit model.

I do know that Miami University of Oxford, Ohio has a virtual museum of the Archeology collection on campus, but I don't have a link. Sorry. The collection is made up of 3-D scans of artifacts and is really cutting-edge. I swear I've seen it and been on the website.

https://dsl.richmond.edu/ Is a really cool set of interactive history stats with maps, and primary resources discussing tough social issues like land acquisition and redlining. Even the history of party lines in the US House of Representatives.

https://voyant-tools.org/ Last but not least Voyant is great for analyzing literature. Or my thesis, just to see what the drinking word actual is. It will pick out most common words, make word clouds etc. So if your slide show on a author out of copyright need pizazz you can upload the NOT copyrighted work for some word clouds. Or see the depth of vocabulary used or check that your resume can be read by an API. Cause that's what this tool is an API. THIS IS NOT an AI generation detector it only counts words

Now most of these projects and tools are for English and are US directed, but I'd love to hear about how the rest of the world is doing Digital Humanities. I'd love to hear about your favorite projects and tools! So maybe add a few to this post?

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.