“إلى من لم ت/ييأس: الحبّ مقاومة”

Maria Popova, We Are the Music, We Are the Spark: Pioneering Biologist Ernest Everett Just on What Makes Life Alive

« 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

« If anyone asks you

how the perfect satisfaction

of all our sexual wanting

will look, lift your face

and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness

of the nightsky, climb up on the roof

and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,

or what “God’s fragrance” means,

lean your head toward him or her.

Keep your face there close.

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image

about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

slowly loosen knot by knot the strings

of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,

don’t try to explain the miracle.

Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means

to “die for love,” point

here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown

and measure with your fingers the space

between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.

When someone doesn’t believe that,

walk back into my house.

Like this.

When lovers moan,

they’re telling our story.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.

Stare into this deepening blue,

while the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,

light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?

Huuuuu.

How did Jacob’s sight return?

Huuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.

Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,

he’ll put just his head around the edge

of the door to surprise us

Like this. »

Rumi, from The Essential Rumi, Translations

by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

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?

« 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

Letter to Nefertiti // by Sana Tannoury Karam

« Archaeology can impact in concrete and beneficial ways to bring about reconciliation and acceptance, rather than simply being the raw material for hostility. »

Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the East, by Lynn Meskell

This is the benchmark against which we should start judging how we do archaeology and how we use it in our modern times.

i don't pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.

― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

« To quote the tomb of leftist Jewish Egyptian activist Shehata Haroun, the father of Magda Haroun, the current president of the few remnants of the Jewish community who remain in Cairo: ‘Every human being has multiple identities, I am a human being, I am Egyptian when Egyptians are oppressed, I am Black when Blacks are oppressed, I am Jewish when Jews are oppressed, and I am Palestinian when Palestinians are oppressed.’ »

— Massoud Hayoun, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History

Beirut and I, we make love like war