Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a portal documenting and mapping the history of Palestinian literature around the World in the 20th century. The project was launched and is managed by Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin. This project is part of an international collaborative project, PalREAD, funded by a European Research Council’s Starting Grant. The website was developed and is hosted by Stanford University Press.

Country of Words aims at uncovering and highlighting the connections between Palestinian literary products originating from different places around the world:

“because of its transnational reality, Palestinian literature makes it possible for us to read together the national and the exilic. It also gives us the opportunity to explore new ways to write nonlinear and nonconventional literary histories of displacement and movement, and to uncover new constellations, networks, trajectories, relationships, and collaborations across multiple literary geographies and periods.”

Dr. Abu-Remaileh, countryofwords.org

Country of Words offers visitors numerous options to navigate its content, including:

  • a Timeline running from 1880 to 2020
  • Networks of periods, people, periodicals and themes
  • Visualizations including maps, networks, timelines, temporal evolutions, trajectories and information cards
  • Audio Interviews in Arabic with important Palestinian writers.

Timeline

The timeline is broken down into periods of time shorter than the full 140 years coverage. Literary Diasporas: The Mahjar (1880-1950) examines the literary production during a time of extensive migration to the American continent and the Caribbean. Literature under British Occupation (1900-1948) limits to literature produced during the late Ottoman and British Mandate period. Literature under Triple Occupation post-Nakba (1948-1967) centers on the effects of the parallel Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian control on writers and literature. Literary Diasporas: post-Nakba Scattering (1948-1967) focuses on the literary production of refugees and exiled writers. Literary Diasporas: A Golden Age in Exile (1967-1982) explores the literary production of new refugees (post-1967). Literarure under Israeli Occupation (1967-1994) covers writings from the Occupied Territories (West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem). The last timeline, Literary Diasporas : post-Beirut Fragmentation (1982-1994) focuses on literature after the dispersion of Palestinians across the Arab World, Cyprus and Europe.

Network

The network mapping allows to visualize and explore the connections between time periods (yellow), authors (blue), periodicals (green) and themes (red). Visitors are invited to click on the nodes to obtain more information about the specific topic.

Visualizations

Visualizations allows to explore the life, migrations and literary production of a writer, contributions to specific periodicals, or the production of a certain type of literature (Prison literature as shown here). Visitors will undoubtedly appreciate the benefits of visualizing information in many different formats.

Audio Interviews

The ten one-hour long interviews of key Palestinian literary figures available on this page are part of a podcast series entitled Balad min kalam (Country of Words). Each episode starts by a discussion of literary evolution, movements across periods and geographies, circles and networks, and periodicals to which they contributed. Then, the guests read a text they have written and explain why they chose it. After that, they are asked to cite a work they think influenced the course of Palestinian literary history. Last, “many of the guests spoke about their personal libraries and how their book collections have been affected by censorship, constant movement, loss, and destruction. Interviews are also indexed and accessible by time period.”

To conclude, we want to note that Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature has been described in very positive terms by many experts in the field. Among them, Professor Michelle Hartman (McGill University) wrote: “With its user-friendly interface, well-suited and attractive visualizations, intelligent analysis, and fascinating author interviews, Country of Words is an invaluable resource that documents and engages the diversity of Palestinian literary production over time, expanding access to it in an inviting digital format.”

The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive / أرشيف المتحف الفلسطيني الرقمي

Sponsored by the Arcadia fund, the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive aims at collecting, digitizing and making widely available (in Open Access) endangered archival materials documenting Palestinian life and history. Started in 2018, the project has now reached its third phase involving partnerships inside and outside Palestine as well as a broadening of the geographical scope covered.

At the time of our visit, the archive included over 200,000 documents like “identification papers, official records, letters, diaries, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films, and audio recordings” collected from individuals, families, and institutions. The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive only keeps digital surrogates and return the original documents to their owners after processing.

Visitors can either Search the archive, Browse collections or Explore topics.

The basic search only requires to enter keyword(s) in the search bar at the top-right corner of the page. The advanced search offers a more refined search where you can limit by:

  • date (default year range is 1900-2024)
  • type(s) of material
  • collection(s) (generally named after donor)
  • entity(ies) (i.e. institution, organization, etc.)
  • location(s).

The collection browse allows to identify specific archives of interest before searching them. The number of documents in each collection range from less than a hundred to thousands of documents. The time period covered is clearly stated at the right-top corner of each collection:

The topics exploration offers a different way of navigating the website through subjects assigned to documents. Among the long list of topics (fifteen in total), visitors will find the following:

The number of documents in each category is indicated right beside the topic, and when scrolling over the topic, a series of thumbnails gives a snapshot of items that will be found under this topic. To ease navigation, the list could be sorted alphabetically.

It is important to note that all materials in the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive are “copyrighted either by the museum or by third parties who have granted permission for their materials to be included on this site. Visitors can therefore only use the documents “for personal, educational, non-commercial use, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.” It is possible to ask for high-resolution images by emailing info@palarchive.org or sending the request via the form available here.

To submit your personal archive, you may fill out the following form:

The website is entirely bilingual English and Arabic.

Archives Africa

Archives Africa is an online catalogue of archival collections documenting the history of Madagascar. Building on a former collaboration contributing to the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, the overall project entitled Finding Africa: exploring the potential of a continent’s archives was developed and run by information professionals from King’s College London and the Direction des Archives Nationales de Madagascar. A first phase focused on Madagascar Prime Minister registers between 1864 and 1896. The second phase of the project targeted Diplomatic archives from the 19th century.

In addition to aiming at identifying and locating archival materials indispensable to scholarship, the project also explored faster and more appropriate ways to describe and catalogue archival collections “from an African perspective”. To do so, they reflected on traditional Western archival practices, and worked towards adapting them and/or creating new practice better suited for archival materials in non-European languages. They worked closely with partners at SCOLMA, a “forum for librarians, archivists and others concerned with African studies materials in libraries and archives in the United Kingdom”.

The rationale behind the project is thoroughly explained in this video posted on the ‘About‘ page:

The ‘Archives Africa Catalogues‘ section is the heart of the website as it includes the records of archival collections. Catalogues can be discovered browsing a number of categories:

At the time of our visit, the total number of collections cataloguing records in the database was close to 900, identifying and locating a much larger number of documents in Malagasy, French, and English.

The News section, despite not having been updated since 2018, makes available interesting and insightful information about the project.

Those interested in learning more about African archives further should consult the International African Institute‘s website, in particular the African digital repositories page. Based in the United Kingdom (at the School for African and Oriental Studies, SOAS), the IAI “promotes the scholarly study of Africa’s history, societies and cultures” for which archival sources are essential.

Nakba Archive

Launched in 2002, the Nakba Archive is an oral history collective based in Lebanon aiming to document the social and cultural lives in Palestine before 1948. Over the years, the Archive interviewed over 650 first generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and recorded “their recollections of life in Palestine and the events that led to their displacement.” The primary objective of the Nakba Archive has been to complete existing written record by allowing refugees to document their histories in their own terms.

Diana Allan founded the Nakba Archive in June 2002. She has a doctorate in anthropology and film from Harvard University and has worked on a several activist media projects in the region. Video documentaries include: Chatila, Beirut (2002); Still Life (2007); and Terrace of the Sea (2010).” She is currently an Associate Professor in Anthropology & Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) at McGill University. Co-founder and manager, Mahmoud Zeidan, is a Palestinian refugee from Ayn al-Helweh camp in Lebanon and active member of the Lebanese Center for Refugees Rights Aidun.

Despite not having been updated in a very long time, the Nakba Archive website remains a valuable source of information on where to find, and how to access the interviews conducted in its early years. A few excerpts have been made accessible from the NA website, but the vast majority of the audio and video recordings can today be found in the Jafet Library (American University of Beirut):

Another part of the the project, Photo48, included scanning “personal photos and documents (registration papers, land deeds, marriage licenses, birth certificates, etc.) which refugees brought with them from Palestine.” Unfortunately, these materials don’t seems to have been made available online anywhere. Interested people could always reach out to the Nakba Archives founders to inquire about them.

Last, the Nakba Archive produced in 2005 and 2008 two documentaries about archival work that can be ordered from the website, or found in your library: Nakba Archive Excerpts is available at McGill University Library.

Foundation for Arab Music Archiving & Research (AMAR) / مؤسّسة التّوثيق والبحث في الموسيقى العربيّة

Launched in 2009, the Foundation for Arab Music Archiving & Research (AMAR) is a private Lebanese organization working towards the preservation of recorded and printed Arab musical tradition of the Nahda (approx. 1903-1935). AMAR also aims at supporting on-going scholarly research in musicology, and promoting traditional Arab music. To do so, AMAR actively collects, catalogues, and digitizes printed scores and audio records, organizes public lectures, scientific conferences, and musical concerts, and ensures its unique collection is accessible to worldwide researchers and the general public.

The Foundation for Arab Music Archiving & Research is supported by numerous artists and music professionals. International renowned musicologists such as Jean Lambert, Nidaa Abou Mrad, Virginia Danielson, or Michael Frishkopf are members of the Consulting & Planning Board. And the foundation is managed by a Leading Team including numerous music specialists and professionals.

Today, AMAR has one of the largest known record collections of Egyptian/Syro-Lebanese Arab music from 1903 through to the 1930s. AMAR also has some partial collections of Lebanese studio recordings that date back to the 1950s.

About‘ page

The geographical focus of the foundation’s work spans from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, the Arab Gulf to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and includes minority groups existing in these countries such as the Syriac, Kurdish, and Coptic communities as well as Sufi orders. If initially, AMAR’s dissemination work relied primarily on CDs and booklets, with the rise of the Internet, efforts were redirected towards the creation of “a website that will deliver Arab music at the highest quality that available technology allows.”

On the website, visitors will find a dynamic timeline highlighting important contributors to the development and circulation of traditional Arab music. Despite some limitations outline in the introductory paragraph, the timeline remains an interesting source of information.

Complementing the timeline, the Artists & Music section offers a different way to navigate the various singers, and composers included in the database:

Moreover, in the past ten years, AMAR produced over 200 Podcast episodes (in Arabic) focusing on individual artists, musical techniques and/or instruments. And the list of events available on a dedicated page gives a idea of the variety of manifestations AMAR participated in and organized: exhibitions, concerts, panels, film screenings, etc. Unfortunately, the most recent ones go back to 2021: one can only hope they will resume activities in this area soon. The Documents page gives access to lengthy and well-documented papers on various people and topics:

Last, the Products page is where one can order materials published by the foundation from, mostly CDs but also a monograph:

It is worthy to note that traditional Arab music enthusiasts will find original music available for listening in a number of the website’ sections (Artists & music, Podcast, and Products). Be advised that the sound quality varies from one recording to another.

For more information, we invite you to consult the Press and Press TV Kits, and/or contact the AMAR Foundation. Their website is available in Arabic and English.

Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive

The Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive (IPSOLHA) is an online archive for primary and secondary sources related to the legal and administrative history of the Indian Princely States started in 2021. Originally sponsored by the Society of Fellows of Dartmouth College, and a Digital Scholarship Grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies Digital Learning Initiative, the project later received support from the Department of History and Information Technology & Consulting at Dartmouth College as well as the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) at the Center for Research Libraries.

During the period of British colonial rule, there were hundreds of semi-sovereign, semi-autonomous states across the South Asian subcontinent. (…) these states (…) were incubators for innovative legal, administrative, and political ideas and offered a unique counterbalance to the hegemony of British rule. Yet despite their unique history, studying these states is complicated by the scattered nature of their archival remains.

About the Project‘, IPSOLHA

The main objective of IPSOLHA is to make the archives relating to these Princely States ,more easily accessible by identifying, cataloguing, and digitizing them when possible to support the legal and administrative history of the Indian Princely States. At the time of our visit, the database included the description of more than 3,000 individual documents, and future efforts will focus not only on continuing to enrich the database with new materials, but also on promoting it as a research tool starting with a series of presentations by Elizabeth Lhost, principal investigator.

The Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive proposes eight categories based on resources types to browse the collection:

Each category displays a list of sources -in a customizable view- some of which accessible online, others to be consulted on site at their holding institution. The left-hand side menu allow visitors to filter results by Subject Headings, Document type, Language, State, and Holding Institutions.

Specialists will particularly appreciate that documents in many languages (English, Gujarati, Hindi, Hindustani, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu, etc.) are included in the database, and that Princely States are identified for each source.

For each item listed, IPSOLHA provides a lengthy description including Subject Headings and Type of resource tags allowing to navigate documents within the database (Main & IPSOLHA tabs), and instructions for accessing the materials (Access tab):

Interested scholars can get in touch with the project team at ipsolha [at] gmail.com, use the Contact form, or follow updates on Facebook, Twitter.

Mizna مزنه

Founded over in 1999 by Kathryn Haddad and Saleh Abudayyeh, Mizna is an Arab-American not-for-profit organization promoting the artistic and cultural production of contemporary South West Asian and North African (SWANA) artists. Mizna is based in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-Saint Paul), Minnesota, USA.

The online platform aims at “reflect[ing] the depth and multiplicity of [the] community and has been committed to being a space for Arab, Muslim, and other artists from the region to reclaim [their] narratives and engage audiences in meaningful and artistically excellent art.”

Through Mizna, audiences have the opportunity to engage in the work of Arab and Muslim artists on its [sic] own terms. And our community has a critical opportunity to see some facet of their own experience reflected on the page or the screen.

https://mizna.org/about/

Since the beginning, the organization has been publishing a biannual literary journal entitled Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America. As of 2021, 38 issues had come out, some of which are still available for purchase on the website. Over the years, more than 400 writers have contributed to Mizna among whom Suheir Hammad, Mahmoud Darwish, Laila Lalami, etc.

In 2003, Mizna engaged in producing the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival (TCAFF) which has become “the largest and longest running Arab film fest in the Midwest”. TCAFF has been showcasing contemporary cinema from the Arab World and from the Arab diaspora, produced by emerging, independent, and established filmmakers, with the objective to present the Arab and Arab American communities in all their complexity far from the stereotyped ways in which they are often depicted in mainstream Western media.

Today, Mizna is run by a Board of Directors and a team of eighteen staff members: an artistic director numerous program curators, event and communication coordinators, editors, and teachers.

The organization was named a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021 by the Ford Foundation and McKnight Foundation, and received several cultural awards such as multiple Knight Arts Challenge Awards, and the Ordway’s Sally Award for Social Impact. Mizna is funded and supported by:

To be informed of their activities, it is possible to sign up for the newsletter, follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube.

CEDEJ carto portal

Established in 1968, CEDEJ (Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économiques Juridiques et Sociales) is a French Research Institute whose main Branch is located in Cairo, Egypt. The core objective of CEDEJ is to facilitate and support multidisciplinary field research focusing on Egypt and surrounding countries like Sudan where a small Branch is located.

CEDEJ is home to an important collection of books (35,000 volumes), journals, newspapers, statistical data as well as maps and plans (over 5,000 items). Part of this collection came from the collection of Cairo French Law School (founded in 1891 and closed in 1956). Among the numerous resources available through CEDEJ, one will find thematic Press Reviews, a digital Press Archive and digital monographs collection -both in collaboration with Bibliotheca Alexandrina-, and a Census Portal (CAPMAS):

CEDEJ map library per se is quite unique: it holds “a multi-scalar collection of cadastral, topographic, and geographic maps covering all of Egypt” running from the end of the 19th century to the 1990s. In November 2021, CEDEJ launched an ergonomic, dynamic and interactive online catalog allowing users to access, extract, and explore textual and geo-referenced data: CEDEJ carto.

cedejcarto.org

We carry an open data policy in strict compliance with the legislation and in the spirit of Plan S, namely “that data should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary”.

https://scienceeurope.org

cedejcarto.org Portal offers to discover the collection via three different options:

  • The advanced search allowing to cross-search location, scale, series and date of publication
  • The search by index allowing to access maps/plans based on the series they pertain to (among the 71 existing series)
  • The search by location allowing to access maps/plans by a simple a click on a large map of Egypt.

Scholars should note that cedejcarto.org is not a database of scanned maps where they will find high resolution images available for download. This portal is a dynamic and interactive online catalogue that will help them identify maps and plans relevant to their research among the large collection of cartographic documents held by the CEDEJ library. Materials can then be requested by filing out the dedicated form and submitting to hala.bayoumi@cedej-eg.org & directioncedej@cedej-eg.org. For more information about usage permissions, people can visit the map library webpage.

cedejcarto.org interface is only available in English.

The Timbuktu Manuscripts

The Timbuktu Manuscripts: discover a trove of Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts digital exhibition and collection is the result of a collaboration between a Malian association called SAVAMA-DCI whose main goal is to preserve and make widely available Arabic manuscripts from Timbuktu and Google Arts & Culture.

Back in 1973, a preservation campaign of the Timbuktu’s collection made of approximately 400,000 codices was initiated by the Ahmed Baba Center (CEDRAB). In 1996, the newly founded association SAVAMA-DCI started raising awareness among private owners about the value of their family manuscripts, providing technical and financial support for the processing and conservation of these materials, and encouraging them to keep the manuscripts in their possession. If funding was limited at first, the association was over time able to collect enough funds to ensure the preservation and inventory of the collections. In 2012, with the jihadist occupation of Northern Mali, the fear that manuscripts would be destroyed lead to the transfer of Timbuktu’s manuscripts collections to other towns in the region like Bamako. According to SAMAVA-DCI over 370.000 codices were rescued.

« Dans la nuit noire de notre existence, les manuscrits sont les projecteurs qui éclairent le passé. »

Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, fondateur de SAVAMA-DCI

The Timbuktu Manuscripts virtual exhibition is incredibly rich (more than 40.000 manuscripts from libraries and private collections) and provides many options to learn about the collections, their history, and the rescue and preservation processes.

The website includes:

  • shorts videos documenting the manuscripts’ preservation
  • pictures documenting the rescue operations, and the digitization of manuscripts
  • topical sub-collections of digitized manuscripts (astronomy, ethics, jurisprudence, mathematics, medicine, geography, etc.)
  • general information about the Arabic manuscripts tradition with a focus on the African tradition
  • detailed descriptions of the collections composing The Timbuktu Manuscripts collection
  • historical and literary information situating these manuscripts in the larger context of knowledge production and dissemination in Africa and beyond.

The most incredible experience offered via this virtual exhibition is the digital archives of the Timbuktu Manuscripts:

The main page gallery is staggering.

The archives includes more than 400,000 handwritten pages from the Qur’an, mathematical, astronomical and medical treatises, sex and black magic manuals, etc. dating from the 11th to the 20th century. A selection of manuscripts are accessible full-text from section 2. The Books. Section 3. Grid View allows to glance at individual pages displayed in a table view when section 4. A Universe of Verses gives access to individual pages in what appears like a much less organized display:

At the very bottom of the main page, The Timbuktu Manuscripts virtual exhibition links to other Google Arts & Culture projects to learn more about Malian music, modern art, architectural heritage, etc.

The Timbuktu Manuscripts website will default to the language of your Google Account. But the interface is accessible in any language available in Google (although some content may not translate).

And for those eager to learn more about the Timbuktu manuscripts, we suggest they go visit the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project website. This project focusing on the “content of the manuscripts, the circulation of scholars and ideas, the economy of the manuscript book, and other aspects of the “work of scholarship” in Timbuktu” was established in 2003 by an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and remains very active.

Qur’an Tools

Qur’an Tools [login page] is a free and open source software facilitating the critical study of the Qur’anic text. It was created and developed by Dr. R. Michael McCoy former Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame and Dr. Andrew G. Bannister, Adjunct Research fellow at Melbourne School of Theology, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Toronto.

In order to use Qur’an Tools, you will need to create an account (email/password). Once logged in, all functionalities become accessible: searching, browsing, text mining, grammatical analysis, cross-referencing, and so much more.

To get started, we suggest consulting the User Guide that provides an outline and explanations of the many features available.

From the homepage, you can already conduct a great variety of searches in Arabic, English transliteration or English. It is important to point that English translations used by Qur’an Tools are:

  • M. Pickthall’s The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: an Explanatory Translation published in 1930
  • A. Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Quran Translation released in 1937
  • A. J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted first published in 1955
  • M. H. Shakir’s The Holy Quran originally issued in 1968.

The ‘Roots’ window offers to add a specific word root to your search box, the ‘Verse Picker’ allows to access directly a particular verse, and the virtual keyboard enables to type either Arabic letters or transliterated characters.

Qur’an Tools is so rich in terms of options and functionalities, that it would impossible to provide a screenshot of every single result page that may display. However, we can highlight some commonalities accross results pages: the Arabic text always comes accompanied by its transliteration in Latin characters, and a translation; also, search terms are highlighted.

Reader Mode
Interlinear Mode
Parse Mode

More advanced features can be found at the top of the page:

Among those, we will only highlight the ‘Chart” functionality that provides visual representations of the textual analysis:

Last, from the Preferences and Account Settings page, users can customise display options such as the search result highlight colour, or the default English translation. And for more insight on how to use the software, a video tutorial is available. Students and scholars whose research involves textual analysis of the Qur’anic text will benefit greatly from this powerful tool.

Qur’an Tools is an open source project, released under the GNU General Public License with terms of use.