Till GrallertIf you had the necessary resources (time and money) to digitise Arabic periodicals, one should probably start with this #SPARQL query to check #Wikidata for unique holdings: https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/r9Gn5nKhkWUYgyYwOU08qAk64wWOQO4ycuCcsSi6Syc.
This week I have been digging around in the #InternetArchive looking for digitised Arabic periodicals. With a bit of #Rstats and far too many hours of #XSLT and #TEI/XML spent on identifying titles based on the very patchy metadata provided by uploaders, there are quite some exciting finds:
The API returned 4500+ items for the keywords "جريدة", "مجلة", and "صحيفة", of which I could identify 781 as pertaining to 100 individual Arabic periodicals published before 1930. Links to all of these have been uploaded to #Wikidata, which will increase their visibility to scholars and the interested public.
There are, of course, thousands of items for which I couldn’t programmatically establish a title with sufficient certainty, let alone try and link them to existing records without actually looking at the digital facsimile and reading the information provided on front-pages and mastheads.
Check out https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/wnywBGxzyyiukWWYiIQqi0smeUCu6AggKG4mOME68i3 to see the results.
#ArabPeriodicalStudies #PeriodicalStudies #DigitalHumanities #wdpd2025
Does anybody know anything about deduplication at the #InternetArchive? Quite frequently people upload the same files as independent items, which could be prevented by checking against checksums.
See, for example, https://archive.org/details/Om-Alqura, which seems to be an exact copy of https://archive.org/details/1320_20220730
It is also interesting to see how people spend significant time and effort to download digital facsimiles from academic repositories, edit every image, and upload them to the Internet Archive.
See, for example, scans of البلاغ الاسبوعي published in Cairo from 1926 onwards ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60578577 ). Scans of the copies held by the University of Tübingen are hosted by the University of Bonn: https://digitale-sammlungen.ulb.uni-bonn.de/ulbbnioa/periodical/pageview/7282062. Based on the position of tears and specks, I am pretty sure that these images are the source of https://archive.org/details/Elbalah-week/مجلة%20البلاغ%20الأسبوعي%20-%20العدد%20001/
#ArabPeriodicalStudies #الصحافة_العربية #remediation #digitisation
While I thoroughly enjoy the wealth of old Arabic periodicals on the Internet Archive, I am also frustrated by the state of metadata. Why do people laboriously upload thousands of individual issues but provide nothing but the **one-word** title? Don’t they want the material to be found? Is there something else to it?
Take, for example, https://archive.org/details/al-masrah_202408, which is the only known digitised copy of المسرح, published by محمد عبد المجيد حلمي in Cairo from 1925 onwards. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124972737
#DigitalHumanities peeps and #Librarians, can you recommend publications on the state of the Internet Archive’s crowd-sourced metadata?
#الصحافة_العربية #ArabPeriodicalStudies #digipres #metadata #periodicalStudies
I’ve just seen this fantastic work worth highlighting during #OAWeek: Somebody is uploading scans of Palestinian periodicals to the @internetarchive at scale: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Palestinian+Historical+Memory-%D8%B0%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A9+%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86%22 . They even add metadata at the issue level!
#CulturalHeritage #الصحافة_العربية #Palestine #Gaza #ArabPeriodicalStudies #PeriodicalStudies
I also wrote a #SPARQL query to see the linguistic composition of the periodical press until 1930 at all locations with titles published in languages of the Eastern Mediterranean: #Arabic, #Ottoman, #Armenian, #Coptic, #Greek, #Farsi, #Ladino, #Azerbaijani
As a table: https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/iDOqXyQ6u8ciKSGCYUkEoS02maygCMy8EccoSa8yuWw
As a map with layers for each language, because sometimes geographic distribution is interesting: https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/XvayrLG3RwUiau4MWWuUEkkuccWmusCSy4gO888Q489
#Wikidata #PeriodicalStudies #ArabPeriodicalStudies #الصحافة_العربية #Multilinguality #multilingualDH
Of course a map is nice to have, but a simple table might often be the more useful thing. So I just wrote the #SPARQL to query #Wikidata for all Arabic periodicals published before 1930 with indicators whether there are known holdings and digitised collections. The table allows to quickly search for titles, years and places of publication.
As a boon to #multilingualDH, the language of results depends on your OS’s settings.
I just added holding information for 100+ Arabic newspapers and magazines published before 1930 from the National Library of Israel to #Wikidata (many are marked as belonging “to the Absentee Property Collection (AP)” in the MARC files from the catalogue and thus a direct result of the #Nakba ). This significantly extends the coverage of pre-Nakba Palestinian periodicals and will allow more people to discover the rich cultural heritage of #Palestine.
URL for a map of all known holdings of pre-Nakba periodicals in Palestine: https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/FastY9YqoKky0AAggWsk4mMeQW284SIOkIGGiEEMQKd
For a documentation of the process and our larger project see my ‘Adding Every Arabic Periodical Published Before 1930 to Wikidata: Moving the Scholarly Crowd-Sourcing Project Jarāʾid to the Digital Commons’. Transformations: A DARIAH Journal 1: Workflows (July 2025): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.46298/transformations.14749.
#PeriodicalStudies #SPARQL #ArabPeriodicalStudies #الصحافة_العربية
Cursory checking my collection of newspaper scans, it seems that the phenomenon is more common than I thought. And apparently I did not pay attention to this material aspect of periodicals when reading them as sources for my research on #Damascus.
The next stamp is from a copy of *Thamarāt al-Funūn* (ثمرات الفنون) also published in Beirut. This time the scan is from a private collection of the editor's heirs and held by the German Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB).
#ArabPeriodicalStudies #BookHistory #MaterialHistory #PeriodicalStudies
