New Trends in the Use of the Computer for the Study of the Middle East

Abstract

The use of the computer as a research tool for the study of the Middle East is a relatively new phenomenon. As the social sciences preceeded history and the humanities in making use of the computer, so have American and European studies preceeded non-Western area studies in this respect. Older, purely literary methods are still dominant in area-specialist journals, computerized and quantitative articles appearing in any quantity only in the journals dealing with the modern period or those which have begun publication within the past decade or two (see my article in the American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter, 93 [Fall 1975]). Much of the social scientific research done on the Middle East, has, in common with that done on Europe and America, involved routine computer processing and statistical analysis, but this material is also generally published in disciplinary journals where most area scholars never see it. Many students of the Middle East are therefore often unaware of the very existence, let alone the potentialities, of much of this new methodology.