Someone in Syria, most likely at the national archives in Aleppo, took the pains to photograph the pages of the newspaper الاتحاد العثماني from the early twentieth century. Someone then uploaded these images to the Internet Archive. BUT WHY did they decide to compress the images down to less than 100 KB per page, which makes them completely illegible? WHY????!!!!!
https://archive.org/details/3_20250515_20250515_2344/page/n181
I had the pleasure to briefly discuss my work on utilising #Wikidata for sharing knowledge about cultural artefacts, exemplified by Arabic periodicals, at #MSUGlobalDH. Slides are available at http://tillgrallert.eu/slides/dh/2026-gdhs/.
@tntype @dbellingradt @BiblioWingate @dohanian
awesome find of the day: I discovered that 15 years ago I was a rather diligent note taker when conducting my doctoral research on Damascus, reading Arabic newspapers at the AUB library all day, everyday for months on end. Apparently, a local, water and steam powered paper mill was established north of #Beirut at نهر انطلياس in late 1882 by ثابت and باحوط. The official inauguration took place with much pomp in the presence of the Vali etc. in March 1883. In November 1882, the Jesuit weekly البشير even printed at least one issue on the new mill’s paper as a marketing device showing off its quality and calling on all printing presses and schools in Syria to utilise this local paper (also, of course, in the service of progress and the nation) .
@tntype @dbellingradt @BiblioWingate @dohanian After running exiftools on a large number of digital facsimiles to compute average page dimensions and combining this ratio with the measured height of Arabic magazines found in library catalogues, it appears that page dimensions of 24.43 cm by 16 cm are somewhat close to Medium octavo after we account for some additional height caused by measuring the outside dimensions of bound library copies.
https://digitalcourage.social/@tillgrallert/115946913237198695
Is there any meaningful literature on the paper trade in the late Ottoman Empire (second half of the 19th century onwards) that I might have missed? I tried all keywords I could think of in the common databases for scholarly literature and searched through works on the history of printing and publishing but came up practically empty-handed.
Amy Ayalon, Hala Auji, Titus Nemeth ( @tntype ), and the late Kathryn Schwartz mention paper in passing. The body of literature on watermarks and manuscripts doesn’t help either as this isn’t concerned with the cheap, industrially produced paper for periodical printing I am interested in.
Is there a chance of @dbellingradt or
@BiblioWingate knowing more?
A small Friday-evening project came to fruition. Analysing data on the dimensions of Arabic periodicals from #Wikidata, a quick and simple plot allows for a number of observations: Firstly, newspapers and magazines are of different sizes and the former tend to be significantly larger than the latter. This bestows confidence on our data set. Misclassification is seemingly rare, particularly for magazines. Secondly, the size of magazines is quite stable at around 24cm with a slight tendency towards larger heights in the 1920s. Thirdly, newspapers are of a much less consistent size with the majority of observations falling into the mid-thirties.
#PeriodicalStudies #الصحافة_العربية #MultilingualDH #DH #DigitalHumanities
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
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
Till Grallert
Jonas Mirbeth
