Learning Arabic - Blog Posts
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?
It’s so exciting to be studying another language and then realise that you understood a complete sentence. And then another complete sentence. I realise they’re very basic sentences, but it’s just fun.
That’s a screenshot of the Sahlawayhi stories, level 2 on LingQ.
Overall, the Sahlawayhi stories were exactly what I needed in a graded reader and I'll read more in this series: the level is good and there's a lot of repetition. However, I could have done without all the racism and sexism in the last story. The way the male characters talk about Thai women was pretty gross. I'll reread the first three stories for more practice.
Sahlawayhi 2 is much the same as the first. Most of the stories are good for practice though one is about suicide. The repetitive vocabulary is very helpful, though.
La fille qui rêvait d'un bidon d'essence et d'une allumette est excellent. Idéal pour apprendre le français, et donne moi envie de vivre dans un monde dirigé par des femmes.
👋 hi language learner! yes, you! have a favor to ask of you :)
for my graduation, i’m researching ways that technology can enhance the language learning process through visual media (series, movies, but also news etc.). for this, i need to speak to learners (of any language, genuinely, no matter your rate of fluency or how long you’ve been studying for) to interview and possibly test my prototype a few times through a link i’ll share with you. it’s also perfectly okay if you haven’t had experience with tools that help you learn through shows and such, but instead have worked with other things such as duolingo.
anything we discuss can be entirely anonymous and can be done via chat here or discord or whatever you prefer, that’s up for discussion. i don’t need to record your voice, provide your real name or show your face, so typing is also fine.
i’d love to hear your input on your wishes for language learning programs and your experiences if you have any so i can design something we may be able to use in the future to learn, that’s hopefully an improvement upon currently existing methods.
as i’ve mentioned, the language you learn is unimportant to me as any feedback is great feedback; but as i need to pick a language to prototype with to keep the scope of my project doable for the period of my graduation (even though i’d *love* to do it for all languages right off the bat ☹️), korean and arabic learners are somewhat preferable as these are languages that i’m familiar with. please don’t let yourself be deterred by this if you’re learning any other language though!
on top of that; i’ll be taking accessibility into account, so if you’re able to give me input on that front, i’d be eternally thankful as well.
if you wanna help me out (thank you so much), please react with a ❤️ to this post or shoot me a message and i’ll get back to you soon. if not, i’d appreciate if you would spread around the message by reposting.
thank you for your attention!
UPDATE: oh my god, this got so much attention 🥺 thank you to those who shared and those who want to help me with this, it means the world. i will be reaching out in the near future :) if anyone else wants to join still feel free to react.