The Potential and Limits of Arabic Digital Humanities

Abstract

Culture is a nuanced term that is hard to define conclusively. It is largely used to refer to the totality of values, basic assumptions and life orientations, beliefs, policies, procedures, and codes of conduct. These are shared by a group of people and affect their behavior and the way they lead their lives. Cultural Analytics (CA), as a field, examines vast amounts of cultural data (books, images, newspapers, music, literature, etc.) to derive culturally relevant insights. Various methods and techniques (natural language processing, network analysis, visualization, and data mining) are applied to cultural components so that they are useful for research in the humanities. CA can help identify the behavioral components of human cultures and provide an accurate insight into the degree to which people conform to the current or target culture. It utilizes the corpora, metadata, and tools of text and image analysis to provide meaningful insights into the subject of research. This special issue explores how we can improve current performance in terms of understanding Arab cultural and social change and how we can implement behavioral changes or transformations more smoothly. The papers in this special issue use digitized printed texts, including books, journals, and printed ephemera to expand our knowledge of the key players in the printed world during a crucial period of modern Arab history. The combination of these sources will illuminate the intellectual trajectories of those who produced such texts and their transnational formal and informal networks.