events

2023

1. Grallert, Till. ‘Computational Approaches to Mundane Texts in Under-Resourced Languages: The Case of Arabic Periodicals’, 10 March 2023.
2. ———. ‘Looking at the Iceberg from below the Waterline. Stylometric Authorship Attribution for Anonymous Articles in Arabic Periodicals from the Early Twentieth Century’, 2023.
3. ———. ‘Minimal Computing to the Rescue: Addressing Our Needs with the People, Tools, and Infrastructures We Have at Hand’. Lecture, 27 June 2023.
4. ———. ‘Neo-Colonial Layers of Invisibility in a Digitised World: Arabic Cultural Production and the Affordances of the Digital’. Input statement, 15 March 2023.

   Abstract

   part of the panel discussion on "Open DH? Mapping Blind Spots", organised by the working group "Empowerment"

5. ———. ‘Quellen Ohne Ressourcen: Ansätze Des Minimal Computing Für Die Erschließung Arabischer Periodika’. Input statement, 15 March 2023.

   Abstract

   part of the panel discussion "Opening Sources – modulare Wege zur Quellenbereitstellung und -edition"

2022

1. Jarkas, Najla, Elie Kahale, Till Grallert, Maya Sfeir, and Jean-Christophe Peyssard. ‘Building Digital Humanities Networks & Training’. Panel Discussion. Online, 14 November 2022. https://web.cvent.com/event/811e389e-78de-46cd-877d-b20b9ae9ed85/websitePage:9539e010-a39c-43ef-98ee-41555cf5c59b?RefId=NOV%2014%20Session%2001.

   Abstract

   This roundtable discussion offers a case study of ‘Building DH Networks & Training outside the Global North: Digital Humanities Institute Beirut’. It pulls together practitioners from a range of career paths and academic disciplines to share their experiences with building and sustaining DH training and networks outside the Global North against the backdrop of their collaboration in organising and running the biennial Digital Humanities Institute Beirut (DHIB, established through the initiative of David Wrisley in 2015). Although Arabic, as the predominant language of the Eastern Mediterranean, has one of the largest communities of speakers with more than 400 million native speakers worldwide and an immensely rich textual heritage, it is also a prime example of under-resourced languages in the digital realm. In addition, societies across the region face challenges from climate breakdown, political turmoil, and prolonged violent conflicts, which all negatively impact their access to (digital) resources and (computational) tools. Moreover, the lack of formal, institutional infrastructures requires a creative, if not “hacky”, approach to the digital turn from funding to technical infrastructures. Sustaining the momentum and expanding the local, regional and international networks fostered by the training institute is particularly challenging in the face of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the financial, political and environmental crises that have recently hit Lebanon and Beirut. Based on the input from the panellists, this round table discussion aims at engaging the audience in a fruitful exchange about the challenges of global DH and possible strategies of how to move forward: which formats and approaches can we imagine for successful and sustainable DH training and community building with the specific affordances available to us?

2. Burckhardt, Daniel, Till Grallert, Beatrice Gründler, Maxim Romanov, and Xenia Kudela Vertan Christina. ‘Disrupting Digital Monolingualism’. Panel discussion, 16 September 2022. https://dot2022.de.

   Abstract

   Working in digital environments in general and engaging in Digital Humanities projects in particular has gained momentum in the DOT community as in all academic disciplines. The new DH section of the DOT 2022 is a good proof of that. However, researchers who deal with non-Latin scripts in digital environments often face challenges and problems that those who work with Latin script based languages are not aware of. Software is mostly developed in English and in or for the “Global North”, thus excluding possible use cases with non-Latin scripts from their agenda. Under the title of “Disrupting Digital Monolingualism” (King’s College 2020), we want to offer a panel discussion aiming to debate different views and experiences with cultural and technological asymmetries in the panelists research in general and in DH projects in particular. We see digital monolingualism not only as a challenge for conducting research with non-Latin scripts in Digital Humanities projects but also as a barrier to global scholarly exchange in general (e.g. lack of visibility of and access to research/sources in non-Anglophone languages and non-Latin scripts). Furthermore, through this panel discussion we also aim to strengthen the faculty-library dialogue and collaboration in order to co-design more multilingually enabled knowledge infrastructures in academia in the future. The recently established “Multilingual DH Lab” at the new Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities at Freie Universität Berlin as well as the foundation of a new working group on multilingual DH in the DHd-association are steps in this direction that we want to expand on. The panel discussion thus aims to provide a critical space to elaborate on the relevant questions of multilingual (non-Latin scripts) Digital Humanities, especially when it comes to advocating multilingually enabled knowledge infrastructures and networking within the DOT community and beyond.

3. Grallert, Till, and Sophie Eckenstaler. ‘Lasst Uns Die Blackbox Öffnen! Aufbau Eines Prototypischen Scholarly Makerspace’, 20 September 2022.
4. Grallert, Till. ‘Historische Netzwerkanalyse Als Zugang Zu Einer Systematischen Periodikaforschung’, 14 September 2022. https://dot2022.de.
5. ———. ‘Looking at the Iceberg from below the Waterline: Stylometric Authorship Attribution for Anonymous Periodical Articles’, 12 September 2022. https://dot2022.de.
6. ———. ‘Zur Erschließung Arabischer Periodika Aus Spätosmanischer Zeit – Herausforderungen Einer Multilingualen Und Multiskriptoralen Digital History’, 26 January 2022. https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/1116.

   Abstract

   Digitalität wohnt ein großes egalitäres Heilsversprechen inne: der uneingeschränkte Zugang zum Wissen der Welt – für jede_n, an jedem Ort, zu jeder Zeit. Erweitert für die Digital History versprechen wir uns die Beantwortung zentraler Forschungsfragen durch die Anwendung computationeller Methoden auf das digital(isiert)e Kulturerbe der Menschheit. Die Grundlage für den Glauben an ein solches Heilsversprechen …

7. Romanov, Maxim, and Till Grallert. ‘Establishing Parameters for Stylometric Authorship Attribution of 19th-Century Arabic Books and Periodicals’. Long presentation, 28 July 2022. https://dh2022.adho.org/program/presentations.
8. ———. ‘Establishing Parameters for Stylometric Authorship Attribution of 19th-Century Arabic Books and Periodicals’, 2022. https://dh-abstracts.library.virginia.edu/works/11858.

   Abstract

   The paper presents the first systematic application of stylometric authorship attribution to nineteenth-century Arabic with the aim of a) empirically establishing thresholds for parameters for reliable attribution and b) contributing computational answers to a core question in Arab Periodical Studies.

2021

1. Grallert, Till. ‘Open Arabic Periodical Editions: Contributing to the Digital Commons Without the Help We Cannot Get’, 8 June 2021. https://dhsi.org/dhsi-2021-online-edition/dhsi-2021-online-edition-aligned-conferences-and-events/dhsi-2021-right-to-left/full-access/.

   Abstract

   The proposed short paper introduces the project Open Arabic Periodical Editions (OpenArabicPE) as a case study of minimal computing to address the specific challenges and affordances of digital humanities in the Eastern Mediterranean. I will outline the socio-technical challenges for digital approaches to the cultural heritage of societies outside the Global North. I pose that a digital episteme deeply rooted in 20th-century, english-speaking, American neoliberal capitalism causes a neo-orientalist silencing of the material heritage of predominantly Arabic-speaking Islamicate societies. This places the onus of corpus building on individual scholars and citizens and requires mitigation strategies on every level of the digital workflow. Influenced by minimal computing and pirate care and based on the guiding principles of accessibility, simplicity, sustainability and credibility, OpenArabicPE originated in 2015 from an attempt to address the core problem of corpus building: the lack of functional Arabic OCR without which one would have to resort to human transcribers. Yet, we could produce reliable ground truth for improving and—with the advent of machine-learning based approaches—training OCR algorithms by combining existing transcriptions from shadow libraries, such as al-Maktaba al-Shāmila, with openly available digital facsimiles for the purpose of validating the former. The proposed paper will introduce the workflows to produce standard-compliant, machine-actionable, scholarly digital editions of Arabic periodicals by creatively repurposing open and free-to-use tools and platforms, which allow us to currently host full-text TEI XML editions of some 630 issues from six journals and more than 7 million words without any funding and resources beyond our own labour time and laptop computers.

2. ———. ‘Digitale Zugänge Zu Periodika’, 11 January 2021.
3. ———. ‘How Did They Do It? Tackling the Question of Authorship with Computational Methods’, 13 November 2021.
4. ———. ‘Mind the ! Digital Humanities Und Das Kulturelle Erbe Des Globalen Südens’. Probevortrag, 4 March 2021.
5. ———. ‘Who Is ʿAlī Pasha? Modelling Personal Names from the Late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean (C.1850–1920)’, 29 October 2021.

2020

1. ———. ‘Catch Me If You Can! Tracing the Late Ottoman Ideosphere through Network Analysis and Stylometry of the Arabic Periodical Press’, 29 April 2020. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831060.

   Abstract

   Digital corpora and computational approaches are indispensable for scrutinising the periodical press as an ideosphere. I argue that one has to transcend the individual periodical and engage in a systematic study of the periodical press at scale in order to better understand both the intellectual history of the Eastern Mediterranean and periodical production itself. The case study of a corpus of four late Ottoman Arabic-speaking periodicals from the Eastern Mediterranean and comprising al-Muqtabas, al-Ḥaqaʾiq, Lughat al-ʿArab and al-Ḥasnāʾ introduces and evaluates some of the mitigation strategies. After introducing my own efforts of building an open and scholarly digital corpus with OpenArabicPE, I engage in computational exploration through network analysis, mapping, and stylometry along the guiding question of what were the core nodes (authors and periodicals) in the ideoscape of the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean? Modelling the network of references to periodical titles, I can confirm established knowledge about the importance of certain journals over others. The Cairene journals of al-Manār, al-Muqtaṭaf and al-Hilāl are central to the late Ottoman Arabic ideosphere, even though they were published outside the Ottoman Empire. A future systematic exploration of periodicals will have to digitise these and compare them to al-Muqtabas, which shows many traits of a periodical of transregional importance very different from the other journals in our corpus. The exploration of the network of article authors, on the other hand, provides a number of surprising results that will need to be addressed in future scholarship: The noted importance of Iraqi writers over Syrians among the core nodes of the network contradicts the common narrative about the Arabic renaissance (nahḍa). A similar importance of Baghdad over the more commonly assumed centres of Arab intellectual production is found in the geographic distribution of toponyms in bylines for al-Muqtabas. One would, again, need to test other transregional periodicals to see whether they provide a similar Iraqi connection or if al-Muqtabas is an outlier in this regard. The network analysis of authors also demonstrates lacunae in the historiography of the Arabic press and the intellectual history of the late Ottoman Arab ideosphere, namely the absence of the core nodes in our network from major works of scholarship. Noting that any analysis of authorship and socio-intellectual networks is limited by the fact that less than one fifths of all articles carry identifiable authorship information, I finally submit our corpus to stylometric analysis. This provides significant hints towards authors of the small number of anonymous articles longer than 5000 words. Testing the hypothesis that a journal’s editors were the actual authors of anonymous texts, the results are inconclusive. The analysis of articles of more than 5000 words in al-Muqtabas returned one cluster of texts by an anonymous author very different from those articles that can indeed by attributed to the editor.

2. ———. ‘Global DH and Minimal Computing’, 18 December 2020.
3. ———. ‘Open Arabic Periodical Editions: A Framework for Bootstrapped Scholarly Editions Outside the Global North’, 2 June 2020.

2019

1. ———. ‘Neither Mosques nor Notables: Urban Food Riots across Late Ottoman Bilād Al-Shām’, 19 January 2019.
2. ———. ‘Tracking the Late Ottoman Ideosphere: Computational Approaches to the Wasteland of the ”Digitised” Arabic Press’, 2 November 2019.

2018

1. ———. ‘Catch Me If You Can! Attempts to Track Networks of Authors and Publication Reviews in the Wasteland of ”Digitised” Arabic Periodicals from the Ottoman Empire’, 20 September 2018.
2. ———. ‘Food Riots as Part of a Repertoire of Contention in Late Ottoman Greater Syria’. Guest lecture, 20 June 2018.
3. ———. ‘Open Arabic Periodical Editions: A Framework for Bootstrapped Scholarly Editions Outside the Global North’, 15 December 2018. https://islamicdh.org/conference-2018/.

2017

1. Grallert, Till, Jochen Tiepmar, Thomas Eckart, Dirk Goldhan, and Christoph Kuras. ‘Digital Muqtabas CTS Integration in CLARIN’, 2017. https://www.clarin.eu/sites/default/files/Grallert-etal-CLARIN2017_paper_21.pdf.
2. Grallert, Till. ‘Authoritarianism versus Liberty of Speech? The Theory and Practices of Press Censorship in Bilād Al-Shām (1875–1914)’, 19 November 2017.
3. ———. ‘Open Arabic Periodical Editions (OpenArabicPE): An Attempt to Unite Gray Online Libraries, Social Editing, and Scholarly Rigour’, 12 April 2017.
4. ———. ‘OpenArabicPE: A Use Case for TEI XML’, 22 March 2017.
5. ———. ‘Werkstattbericht: Arabische Buch- Und Rezeptionsgeschichte in Open Arabic Periodical Editions (OpenArabicPE)’, 1 July 2017.
6. ———. ‘Women in the Streets! Urban Food Riots in Late Ottoman Bilād Al-Shām’, 26 January 2017.