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?

#PaperHistory #OttomanEmpire #PeriodicalStudies #PaperTrade

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

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.

https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003Uc7gk5ozqoESiKquKIuiwiGAUMwsI4qka4cIuKYyEX

#PeriodicalStudies #الصحافة_العربية #ArabPeriodicalStudies

How do you know a text about China published in an Arabic journal in Cairo in 1907 is a translation from a Western language in Latin script? The Arabic transcriptions of Chinese names do not make sense phonetically. Take for example "جريدة سهان باو التي تصدر في مدينة شنغاي وهي التي أسست سنة ١٨٦٨” referencing, as I believe, the newspaper "申报" (Shen Bao).

source: al-Muqtabas, https://openarabicpe.github.io/journal_al-muqtabas/tei/oclc_4770057679-i_16.TEIP5.xml#p_167.d1e2044

申报 on Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q919710

#Multilinguality #PeriodicalStudies #Transcriptions