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Digital archiving in the Arab world: Assessment and challenges

L’archivage numérique dans le monde arabe : état des lieux et enjeux
الحفظ الرقمي في العالم العربي: التقييم والتحديات
Hala Bayoumi et Sébastien Oliveau
p. 13-20

Résumés

Cet article constitue l’introduction du numéro de la revue Égypte/Monde arabe consacré à l’archivage numérique. Il revient d’abord sur le contexte institutionnel qui a vu l’émergence de ce numéro, et particulièrement l’organisation d’un colloque international à Abu Dhabi en 2019 dont ce numéro sélectionne les meilleurs articles. Les auteurs abordent ensuite l’importance, et trop souvent l’urgence, des politiques d’archivage pour sauvegarder de multiples pans de la culture et des sociétés arabes, aussi bien dans les différents domaines artistiques (la musique en particulier) que sociaux (journaux, récits individuels). Enfin, l’article positionne ce travail dans le champ des humanités numériques. Il s’agit d’une part de proposer un effort théorique face à la technique et d’autre part de rappeler l’importance de ces processus techniques qui sous-tendent l’ensemble de ces travaux. A cela s’ajoute le fait que la langue arabe n’a pas encore bénéficié des mêmes développements informatiques que les langues latines, rendant la préservation du patrimoine existant plus compliqué.

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Texte intégral

The DAAW symposium

1This issue of Égypte/Monde arabe gathers a selection of papers presented during the Digital Archiving in the Arab World (DAAW) international symposium that took place in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) from October 26, to 28 2019. This symposium -the first of its kind- was hosted by Sorbonne Abu Dhabi and the National Archives of the United Arab Emirates. Twenty-six presentations were made, starting with linguist and Arabic digital typography specialist Thomas Milo. The founder of company Decotype (www.decotype.com), Thomas Milo discussed the challenges surrounding digital harmonisation of Arabic typography, quoting his experience related to smart and interactive digitalisation of the Quran. Such an opening address underlined the key issue of adapting a cultural area – the Arab world – to a global dynamic-digitalisation.

2The symposium was organised around six themed sessions: multidisciplinary approaches to digital archiving; methodologies used to preserve tangible and intangible heritage; data scientific analysis; digital libraries in the Arab world; endangered manuscripts, rare books and documents; the role of archives and digital collection in making knowledge available to the broader public. This event is the brainchild of the Digital Humanities section of CEDEJ, an entity praised for its archiving and digital tool development skills (big data treatment and analysis, interactive maps…). More precisely, the idea of this symposium emerged during the presentation of CEDEJ’s digital programmes on 26 October 2017 at an event organised by Sorbonne Abu Dhabi and CEFAS to share their own experiences in the field of digital humanities.

  • 1 Initially planned in October 2020, this once-every-five-years event was postponed due to the covid (...)

3On this occasion, representatives of the National Archives of the United Arab Emirates expressed an interest about this topic, while the Bibliotheca Alexandrina – collaborating with CEDEJ on five digital programmes – was a natural partner from the very start. The Bibliotheca has banked on digital technology, becoming one of the leading Internet-based archive centres in the world as well as a digital resource centre linked to numerous other libraries. Hosting the symposium in 2019 at Sorbonne Abu Dhabi and the National Archives of the United Arab Emirates bears witness to the importance granted to digital archiving in the UAE ahead of the organisation in the country of the International Council for Archiving (ICA) Conference in October 2021.1

4A defining moment in many ways, the DAAW symposium enabled researchers and practitioners from three continents and more than a dozen countries to meet and exchange. Indeed, it provided them with an opportunity to thoroughly assess the state of digital archiving in the Arab world and see how it can be improved. It also allowed for regional digital archiving ideas and good practices to be shared between these international experts, academics and professionals.

The Arab world, archives and the digital realm

5It is clear that we have not been able to bring together all the digital archiving programmes in the Arab world either during the symposium or in this issue of Égypte/Monde arabe. Although Western initiatives in the Arab world are given abundant coverage, we tend to forget what Arab countries – including first and foremost their national institutions – have produced in this domain. Beyond the Bibliotheca Alexandrina -a pioneer in Egypt and an international reference- the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub wal-Watha’ia) is at the forefront of archiving endeavours, using the latest digitalising techniques for, among others, its digitalisation programme of 120 Arabic manuscripts. It would actually be impossible to refer to every single digitalisation programme in the region. Let us however remind the following: 3.5 million pages of documents and manuscripts have been digitalised at the Qatar National Library, including 1.5 million available on its website (ediscovery.qnl.qa). Abu Dhabi Media (admedia.ae/en/digital-media.aspx) has digitalised more than 3 million video, radio and press documents pertaining to the history of the UAE and Cheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan. The Palestinian Museum (palarchive.org) was able to digitalise 18 000 Palestinian documents related to various subjects as part of its digital archiving programme. The National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco (www.bnrm.ma) has opened a digital lab to digitalise part of Moroccan national documentary audio heritage, aiming at making it easily available to the broader public -including those accessing remotely- on its user-friendly web platform. Nowadays digital archiving in the Arab world is one of the main channels of preservation, diffusion and transmission of knowledge. As the practice develops, new challenges emerge and act as a catalyst for innovation and new technology development, and Arab history and civilisation represent some of the cornerstones of Humanity’s modern history and heavily contribute to today’s digital knowledge. This symposium thus aimed at highlighting the rich content produced by the region as well as the importance of digital archiving in this area.

  • 2 The Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 14 May (...)

6While global digitalisation goes beyond borders, knowledge and culture cannot be limited to books: too many sources, ancient and more recent, have already been lost. Cultural heritage has heavily suffered as a result of the most recent conflicts. “Damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world”.2 The Arab world is currently facing a real challenge: never before has its heritage been exposed to so many different threats. On top of natural degradation and deterioration processes come manmade threats with the intensification of deliberate destructions such as the Al-Nuri Mosque (Iraq) that was dynamited by Daesh. Other examples include the exceptional archeological heritage of Zabid, one of the coastal cities of the region of Tihama in the west of Yemen where 40% of houses have been replaced by concrete buildings (UNESCO 2019), or the fate of many cities in Lebanon that have been deeply marked by war.

7In Cairo (Egypt), the premises of the Egyptian Geographical Society burnt down in 2011, including contents that are now lost forever as no record was kept. Founded in 1875 by Khedive Ismail, the Egyptian Geographical Society is the oldest geographical society outside of Europe and the Americas and the ninth of its kind. It possessed an important volume of rare atlases, maps and reports of major geographical discoveries written by great explorers such as Stanley and Samuel Baker. The partial destruction of the building in 2011 hinders further work on these documents. One of the objectives of digital archiving is thus to contribute to preserving the region’s identity, knowledge and heritage by widening accessibility and expanding their lifespan. However, such efforts must be made without underestimating the constraints and limits of digitalisation as developed by Roy Rosenzweig (Rosenzweig 2012).

Archiving and digital humanities

8This issue of Égypte/Monde arabe contributes to what has been called digital humanities since the mid-2000s, although the concept derives from the computational turn (Berry 2011) of the 1970s (Hayles 2016; Berra 2012). It must be reminded that “Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices” (Schnapp, Lunenfeld and Presner 2009). As such, it gathers various (multimedia) tools, and calls for new methods and tools. Two complementary dimensions can indeed be found in digital humanities: the use of digital tools by the scientific community working on humanities (literature, linguistics, archeology, history, economy, sociology, anthropology, etc.) and academia-based knowledge ressources. This double function deeply questions practices (Casilli 2012) and requires the development of new methods, treatments, algorithm definitions and tools. This can only be achieved as a result of a synergy between epistemology specialists – warrants of the knowledge collected over time – and mathematical and IT specialists implementing the conservation of all the data, their validity, treatment, interoperability and accessibility, what Cécile Boulaire and Romeo Carabelli named “bringing together two rigours” (Boulaire, Carabelli, 2017; Cavalié, Frédéric, Legendre et al. 2017).

9Two driving forces lay beneath digital humanities: safeguarding and fair circulation. Archiving is therefore a constant issue: as the authors of the first book dedicated to digital humanities recall, pioneers in the field “first used the computer for record making and record keeping, in the knowledge that data in this form would see more flexible utilization, particularly in computer-assisted statistical analysis” (Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth 2004). Digital humanities thus aim at safeguarding Humanity’s memory, the production of the various civilisations and the ongoing evolution of thought, art and written works. This new digital memory breathes new materiality into Nemrod, Hatra, Mossoul or devastated Palmyra. It will ensure that the most beautiful things ever produced by Man are never erased by natural disasters (the lighthouse of Alexandria, the Kafara dam – or Sadd al-Kafara, the disparition of Santorini) or by human voluntary destructive actions.

Putting digital archiving in perspective with the current technics, theories and practices in use in the Arab world

10The papers presented at the symposium deal with the practices linked to digital archiving, each illustrating one or several possible applications and always backed by a thought process addressing issues of methods and theories. In a context of multiplying initiatives, it might have seemed arduous at first sight to build a coherent issue of Égypte/Monde arabe. However, it appeared logical to highlight three particular aspects pertaining to digital archiving in the Arab world: technical aspects, theoretical aspects and case studies.

11Technical aspects might be the more essential of all: apart from ethnography of course, social sciences tend to neglect the technical dimension or at least fail to emphasise on its importance. Although technique often represents an important blockage, is it seldom mentioned – or very superficially – in the conclusion of research projects. Yet, technique reappears as a major issue when dwelling on digital humanities in general and archiving in particular (not to mention specifically archiving in the Arab world). For instance, he computerised writing of Arabic has not reached Latin alphabet languages’ levels of standardisation. As a result, norms vary and raise a number of issues when it comes to character recognition solutions. Indeed, although the Arabic writing system is unicase, the positioning of diacritics varies and results in different automatic readings for the same word, depending on the scribe. Moreover, the purely aesthetic presence of ligatures further hinders artificial automatic recognition. It therefore appeared important to start the current issue with papers exploring this aspect of digital archiving in the Arab world. In a digital humanities perspective, it seems also essential to emphasise on such a technical dimension.

12The second aspect addresses issues related to epistemology in digital humanities. These are texts that question the practices of digital archiving in the Arab world from a theoretical point of view as well as issues pertaining to the digitalisation of archives. Among these issues, access seems to be a key notion nowadays. It will be noted that practice standardisation was not directly addressed, neither during the symposium, nor in this issue of Égypte/Monde arabe. It is however an essential element of digital archiving and communication that undoubtedly mirrors the lack of maturity of such reflections. Moreover, the question of ontologies, although omnipresent as it should be, was not the main subject of any of the papers presented, although it was indirectly addressed on many occasions.

13The final part of this issue of Égypte/Monde arabe addresses in a pragmatic way digital archiving experiences in the Arab world. Shunning the rather institutional or academic approach of the first papers, it focuses on more anthropological approaches while material become more diverse. Although texts are still referred to as primary sources of interest, images and sounds appear as important elements of societies that remain difficult to archive. Digital archiving appears as an important driving force to safeguard heritage threatened by politics, negligence or poverty. Beyond state-run archiving endeavours, various initiatives have emerged, spanning from accounts on online video-sharing platforms stocking film or audio recordings to more structured efforts that are sometimes linked to international projects.

14To conclude this issue and shed a new light on the topics mentioned we chose a paper bordering on art and science. This last text presents indeed an artistic reconstitution based on archives previously described as “bootleg” from the pre-1958 daily life of a major Arab city. This is an opportunity for the reader to question what the past brings to us, what we perceive of it, what can be said about it and how.

Conclusion: scientific cooperation in the Arab world

15As a conclusion, we deemed important to recall the institutional context from which this issue of Égypte/Monde arabe stemmed: in the words of sociologists, one must say where they speak from. This CEDEJ-led initiative which resulted in this symposium developed during a day of talks and workshops at Sorbonne Abu Dhabi, which was organised in close cooperation with several Egyptian and Emirati institutions. France’s scientific cooperation policy is an old and structured one, relying on institutions such as CEDEJ and CEFAS partly operated by CNRS and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE). Wherever they exist, these institutions allow for both a fertile dialogue with academics from the entire world and the development beyond national borders of France’s research policy.

16In the last few years, French research pushed for the development of an open science ecosystem, which translated into the development of large infrastructures that have proved their worth, especially as far as social sciences were concerned. The Committee for open science (Comité pour la science ouverte, www.ouvrirlascience.fr) was also created in 2018 under the authority of the Ministry of Higher Education and Innovation. Open science is defined in this context as a movement “aiming at building an ecosystem in which science will be more cumulative, better supported by data, more transparent, faster and universally accessible”. Social sciences have played an active role and more often than not been pioneers in this general movement.

  • 3 OpenEdition is hosting Egypte/Monde arabe publications.

17OpenEdition3 (https://www.openedition.org) for instance, established more than two decades ago, makes available to the public more than 10 000 books and 500 academic magazines related to social sciences. The project of the Centre for direct academic communication (Centre pour la communication scientifique directe, www.ccsd.cnrs.fr) was founded at the start of the 2000s and is at the origin of the HAL open archives (hal.archives-ouvertes.fr) creation that list more than 2 million references and make available more than 700 000 academic documents to the public. Beyond academic publishing, the extremely large research infrastructure (très grande infrastructure de recherche, or TGIR) Huma-Num (www.huma-num.fr) offers digital data storage and diffusion services as well as a search engine dedicated to research (isodore.science). At last, the PROGEDO TGIR aims at developing data culture by supporting the production of large surveys, making accessible public data as well as the data produced by these surveys and developing data platforms in universities to accompany concerned communities.

18This issue of Égypte/Monde arabe is therefore not only the result of this institutional context, but also of the academic practices and the contributing authors’ reflexivity.

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Bibliographie

Berra A. 2012, “Faire des humanités numériques” in Mounier P., Read/Write Book 2: Une introduction aux humanités numériques, 25‑43. Read/Write Book, URL: http://books.openedition.org/oep/238, consulted on 04/08/2020.

Berry D., 2011, “The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities”. Culture Machine 12. URL: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/10-Computational-Turn-440-893-1-PB.pdf, consulted on 04/08/2020.

Boulaire C., Carabelli R., 2017, “Du digital naïve au bricoleur numérique: les images et le logiciel Omeka”, in Cavalié É., Frédéric C., Legendre O. et Martin D., Expérimenter les humanités numériques. Parcours numérique, Montréal: Les presses de l’université de Montréal.

Casilli A., 2012, “Comment les usages numériques transforment-ils les sciences sociales ? ” in Pierre Mounier, Read/Write Book 2: Une introduction aux humanités numériques, p. 239‑47. Read/Write Book, URL: http://books.openedition.org/oep/286, consulted on 05/09/2020.

Cavalié É., Clavert F., Legendre O., Martin D., 2017, Expérimenter les humanités numériques. Parcours numérique, Montréal: Les presses de l’université de Montréal, URL: http://www.parcoursnumeriques-pum.ca/experimenterleshumanitesnumeriques, consulted on 11/12/2020.

Caverni J-P, Dacos M., 2009, “Construire les Digital humanities en France. Des Cyber-infrastructures pour les Sciences humaines et sociales” (rapport), Conférence des Présidents d'universités (CPU), URL: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/sic_00485477/, consulted on 11/12/2020.

Hayles K.N., 2016, “Les humanités numériques : Une problématisation en cours” in Hayles N.K., Lire et penser en milieux numériques : Attention, récits, technogenèse, Grenoble: UGA Éditions, p. 69-117, URL: https://books.openedition.org/ugaeditions/386, consulted on 11/12/2020.

Julien-Saavedra Q., Citton Y., 2015, “Manifeste pour des humanités numériques 2.0”. Multitudes no. 59 (2), p. 181-95.

Rosenzweig, R., 2012, “Pénurie ou abondance ? Préserver le passé à l’ère du numérique”, in Read/Write Book 2: Une introduction aux humanités numériques, edited by Mounier P., p. 113‑49. Read/Write Book. URL: http://books.openedition.org/oep/265, consulted on 08/09/2020.

Schnapp, J., Lunenfeld P., Presner T., 2009, “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0”, URL: https://humanitiesblast.com/, consulted on 05/09/2020.

Schreibman S., Siemens R., Unsworth J., 2004, A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell. URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-1-2&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-1-2&brand=default, consulted on 05/09/2020.

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Notes

1 Initially planned in October 2020, this once-every-five-years event was postponed due to the covid-19 pandemic.

2 The Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 14 May 1954.

3 OpenEdition is hosting Egypte/Monde arabe publications.

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Référence papier

Hala Bayoumi et Sébastien Oliveau, « Digital archiving in the Arab world: Assessment and challenges »Égypte/Monde arabe, 22 | 2020, 13-20.

Référence électronique

Hala Bayoumi et Sébastien Oliveau, « Digital archiving in the Arab world: Assessment and challenges »Égypte/Monde arabe [En ligne], 22 | 2020, mis en ligne le 03 janvier 2022, consulté le 16 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ema/13141 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ema.13141

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Auteurs

Hala Bayoumi

Dr Hala Bayoumi is a research engineer at the CNRS France (National Centre for Scientific Research) and head of the Digital Humanities cluster at the CEDEJ. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPHE (Paris, France) and a habilitation in Geography from University Jean Moulin (Lyon, France). She is the winner of the CNRS 2017 crystal medal, and ambassador of the program “La Science taille Xxelle”. She published different books and websites and co-edited recently with Karine Bennafla Atlas de l’Égypte Contemporaine, 2020. She coordinated since 2010 a Master's level diploma in Data Analysis and Spatial Analysis Techniques (GIS 4D) for Egyptian officials from CAPMAS (inter-university diploma EPHE-university of Lyon).

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Sébastien Oliveau

Dr Sébastien Oliveau is Associate Professor at the university of Aix-Marseille, holding a habilitation in Geography and conducting research in the Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (Aix-Marseille Univ., CNRS, UMR 7305). He is the director of the large research infrastructure PROGEDO (CNRS, EHESS, USR 2006). His work focuses on population and digital humanities. http://sebastien.oliveau.fr/

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