XXs | beirut, lebanonStoryGraph: @hakawatiyya Side Blog: hakawatiyya
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Latest Posts by eternallybeirut - Page 2
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?
"I am jealous of my senses. The air is the colour of gardenias, your smell on my shoulders like laughter and triumphal arches. I am jealous of the peaceful daggers lying sheathed before you on the table, waiting for a sign from you to kill me. I am jealous of the vase, which has no need of its yellow roses because you give it the full benefit of your deep red lips, hungry for my hunger. I am jealous of the painting staring greedily at you: look longer at me, so I too can have my fill of lakes and cherry orchards. I am envious of the foliage on the rug, straining upwards to see an anklet descending on it from above, and of the anklet when it rests on your knee, making the marble in the room as hot as my fantasies. I am envious of the bookshop that is out of sorts because it doesn't carry an erotic book in praise of two small ivory hills, bared before it to a frenzy of guitars, then hidden by a wave of sighing silk. I am envious of my fingers catching the dialogue of darkness and light as it overflows from your hands, the movement of a spoon in your teacup, the salts stirred up in a body that yearns for a storm to spark the fire of song: gather me up, all of you, and hold me close so I can envy my memories of you in the future. I envy my tongue, which calls your name with as much care as someone carrying four crystal glasses in one hand. I taste the letters of your name one by one, like lyrical fruits. I do not add water to them, so as to preserve the taste of peaches and the thirst of my senses. I envy my imagination embracing you, silencing you, kissing you, caressing you, holding you tight and letting you go, bringing you near and pushing you away, lifting you up and putting you down, making you submit and submitting to you, and doing all the things I never do."
- Mahmoud Darwish, from I Am Jealous of Everything Around You.
"By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale." - Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
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.
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?