Till Grallert

NFDI 4Memory

Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Universitätsbibliothek

Friedrichstrasse 191--3

10117 Berlin

I am a social and media historian of the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean from the 19th century to the present. I lead the NFDI4Memory’s Methods Innovation Lab at the Department of History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2023. Here, we work at establishing the necessary data culture for the age of digitality through fostering digital and computational tool literacy and experiment as a hermeneutical approach for the humanities.

I hold a PhD in history from Freie Universität Berlin (2014) and an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, 2008), University of London. My research and teaching are concerned with the consequences of the fundamental epistemic change towards the digital for societies of the Global South and the social and entangled histories of technologies and infrastructures in the predominantly Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean since the late 18th century: from streets, tramways and the telegraph to printing and the periodical press, to more recent new media and platforms of the digital.

Influenced by the spatial turn, a history from below and quotidian history, I initially asked “to whom belong the streets?” in my doctoral work, which I completed with a thesis on “Property, Propriety, and Appropriation: The Production of Public Space in Late Ottoman Damascus, 1875–1914”. This trajectory continued with postdoctoral research at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Lebanon, on the genealogy of food riots as a repertoire of contention and the gendered dimension of contentious actions in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Deeply involved in digital humanities work as a practicioner, teacher, and consultant and grounded in my experiences with the specific affordances of the Global South for DH and computational humanities as a researcher predominantly living in Lebanon between 2011 and 2021, my digital and computational work provides a theory-driven, practical critique of the epistemic violence of the post-digital moment and the neocolonial hegemony of the anglophone West. I address these issues as co-convenor of working groups on Multilingual DH within ADHO and DHd and in multiple projects:

a framework for bootstrapped scholarly editions outside the global north (“Open Arabic Periodical Editions”, OpenArabicPE);
a crowd-sourced union list of all Arabic periodicals published globally before 1930 (Jarāʾid);
and building minimal infrastructures of multi-layered annotation to digitised cultural artefacts as a space for inherently local narratives (al-Iwan: Disorienting Orientalism).

As such my work is closely related to developments in code and platform studies as well as global, decolonial, and critical DH.

Finally, in the realm of periodical studies, I am interested in the socio-linguistics of early Arabic newspapers and the specifics of historical periodical production. The computational investigation of the ideoscape of early Arabic periodicals and at scale, has been supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship.

NOTE: this website is currently under development and not all sections have been populated yet.

news

Sep 01, 2023	I humbled and honoured to have been invited to deliver the closing keynote at the joint MEC and TEI conference “Encoding Cultures” in Paderborn next Friday.
Aug 30, 2023	I just signed a new contract and will be leading a new Methods Innovation Lab at HU Berlin as part of NFDI 4Memory. This also means that, sadly, I did return the funds from my MSCA fellowship at University of Hamburg.
May 10, 2023	I will participate in the conference “Digital History 2023” in Berlin with a paper titled “Looking at the iceberg from below the waterline. Stylometric authorship attribution for anonymous articles in Arabic periodicals from the early twentieth century”.
Mar 01, 2023	I will participate in the upcoming DHd2023 in Trier as a panelist for two panel discussions: “Open DH? Mapping Blind Spots”, organised by the empowerment working group and “Opening Sources – modulare Wege zur Quellenbereitstellung und -edition” organised by the working group digital humanities of the Max Weber Stiftung.
Oct 10, 2022	Nadja Danilenko interviewed me for her podcast “tell me a history - Erzähl mir eine Geschichte” and I spoke about early Arabic periodicals and digital humanities.

selected publications

Adding Every Arabic Periodical Published Before 1930 to Wikidata: Moving the Scholarly Crowd-Sourcing Project Jarāʾid to the Digital Commons

Till Grallert

Apr 2025

Abs DOI Bib

This paper documents the contribution of comprehensive bibliographic data on all Arabic periodicals published worldwide until 1930 to Wikidata. We discuss the need for such a data set, which originated with scholarly crowd-sourcing project Jarāʾid and comprises information on more than 3000 periodicals, about 2700 editors, and almost 350 holding institutions, the weaknesses of our original approach, and how the move to Wikidata, the largest public and open knowledge graph, addresses them. We demonstrate how Wikidata also satisfies the two predominant use cases of this data set not currently served by available library and discovery systems. Finally, we show how the move to Wikidata generates continuous engagement with wider Wikimedia communities and demonstrate the reusability of our approach with a second data set of periodicals from the Ottoman Empire.
@misc{Grallert2024AddingEveryArabic, type = {Preprint}, title = {Adding {{Every Arabic Periodical Published Before}} 1930 to {{Wikidata}}: {{Moving}} the {{Scholarly Crowd-Sourcing Project Jar{\=a}ʾid}} to the {{Digital Commons}}}, shorttitle = {Adding {{Every Arabic Periodical}}}, author = {Grallert, Till}, year = {2025}, month = apr, publisher = {Zenodo}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.14112647}, urldate = {2024-11-14}, archiveprefix = {Zenodo}, langid = {english}, keywords = {Arabic Periodicals,Digital Humanities,Linked Open Data,Union Catalogue,Wikidata}, file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/LVGFXKH9/Grallert - 2024 - Adding Every Arabic Periodical Published Before 1930 to Wikidata Moving the Scholarly Crowd-Sourcin.pdf} }
Investigating Ottoman Press Censorship in the Eastern Mediterranean through Conceptual History: The Peculiar Use of ’incident’ (Ḥāditha)

Till Grallert

Die Welt des Islams, Feb 2025

Abs DOI Bib

This paper re-evaluates the history of Ottoman censorship through the lens of conceptual history, focusing on how the periodical press of Damascus and Beirut reported incidents of violence between 1875 and 1914. I argue that well into the twentieth century, the Ottoman state had insufficient power to comprehensively enforce censorship. Instead, the press and the state were interdependent and shared the belief in a modernising project with the ever-expanding state at its core. The press largely understood its role as serving society as it moved along this path to progress and prosperity. Thus, we encounter deeply entrenched editorial tactics, epitomised by the reference to generic "incidents," to deal with the tension between violence as a quotidian phenomenon and its very occurrence being perceived as a fundamental challenge to the social contract. Analysing the tactics used to delegitimise acts of violence and their perpetrators, the paper establishes an ontology and a topography of the discourse on violence in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean.
@article{Grallert2024Haditha, title = {Investigating {{Ottoman}} Press Censorship in the {{Eastern Mediterranean}} through Conceptual History: The Peculiar Use of 'incident' ({\d H}{\=a}ditha)}, author = {Grallert, Till}, year = {2025}, month = feb, journal = {Die Welt des Islams}, doi = {10.1163/15700607-20240040}, copyright = {All rights reserved}, langid = {english}, keywords = {DOI: not found,writing: 2022 Entertainment}, file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/E8W2DDVX/Grallert - 2025 - Investigating Ottoman press censorship in the Eastern Mediterranean through conceptual history the.pdf} }
NER4all or Context Is All You Need: Using LLMs for Low-Effort, High-Performance NER on Historical Texts. A Humanities Informed Approach

Torsten Hiltmann, Martin Dröge, Nicole Dresselhaus, and 9 more authors

Feb 2025

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Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, do to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends.
@misc{HiltmannEtAl2025NER4allPreprint, title = {{{NER4all}} or {{Context}} Is {{All You Need}}: {{Using LLMs}} for Low-Effort, High-Performance {{NER}} on Historical Texts. {{A}} Humanities Informed Approach}, shorttitle = {{{NER4all}} or {{Context}} Is {{All You Need}}}, author = {Hiltmann, Torsten and Dr{\"o}ge, Martin and Dresselhaus, Nicole and Grallert, Till and Althage, Melanie and Bayer, Paul and Eckenstaler, Sophie and Mendi, Koray and Schmitz, Jascha Marijn and Schneider, Philipp and Sczeponik, Wiebke and Skibba, Anica}, year = {2025}, month = feb, number = {arXiv:2502.04351}, eprint = {2502.04351}, primaryclass = {cs}, publisher = {arXiv}, doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2502.04351}, urldate = {2025-02-13}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, keywords = {Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence,Computer Science - Computation and Language}, file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/VSVYWVRQ/Hiltmann et al. - 2025 - NER4all or Context is All You Need Using LLMs for low-effort, high-performance NER on historical te.pdf} }
Looking at the Iceberg from below the Waterline: Stylometric Answers to Unattributed Texts in Early Arabic Periodicals

Till Grallert

In Digitale Methoden in Der Geschichtswissenschaftlichen Praxis: Fachliche Transformationen Und Ihre Epistemologischen Konsequenzen, Berlin, 23.-26.5.2023., Dec 2023

Abs DOI Bib

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Arabic periodicals were the first mass-medium of South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and formed an increasingly globalised public sphere. Consequently, they attract increasingly scholarly attention. However, most articles up until at least World War I were published without a proper byline, commonly causing scholars to conflate owners-cum-editors with their journals. This paper computationally addresses the question of authorship through stylometric authorship attribution applied to data sets derived from digital corpora of journals published in Baghdad (Lughat al-ʿArab), Cairo (al-Zuhūr, alMuqtabas), and Damascus (al-Muqtabas, al-Ḥaqāʾiq) between 1906 and 1918. It demonstrates, firstly, that titles were stylistically sufficiently different to identify a distinctive authorial voice for each periodical. Secondly, it shows that individual anonymous articles cannot be reduced to a single author for each journal and that ownerscum-editors should not be considered strong candidates for their authorship. Thirdly, it also rejects owners-cumeditors as strong candidates for the bulk of anonymous texts originally published in short chunks as part of news sections, announcements, miscellanea etc. Finally, this paper rejects all known authors in our corpus as potential editors thus necessitating further, non-computational research.
@incollection{Grallert2023LookingIceberg, title = {Looking at the Iceberg from below the Waterline: {{Stylometric}} Answers to Unattributed Texts in Early {{Arabic}} Periodicals}, shorttitle = {Looking at the Iceberg}, booktitle = {Digitale {{Methoden}} in Der Geschichtswissenschaftlichen {{Praxis}}: {{Fachliche Transformationen}} Und Ihre Epistemologischen {{Konsequenzen}}, {{Berlin}}, 23.-26.5.2023.}, author = {Grallert, Till}, editor = {Althage, Melanie and Dr{\"o}ge, Martin and Hiltmann, Torsten and Prinz, Claudia}, year = {2023}, month = dec, pages = {1--15}, address = {Berlin}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.10159446}, urldate = {2023-12-13}, copyright = {CC BY 4.0}, langid = {english}, keywords = {talk: stylometry}, file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/723NEZ34/looking_at_the_iceberg_from_below_the_waterline.pdf} }

Proper Fun? Struggles over Popular Entertainment in Late Ottoman Damascus (c.1875-1914)

Till Grallert

In The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East, Dec 2023

Bib

@incollection{Grallert2023ProperFun,
  title = {Proper Fun? {{Struggles}} over Popular Entertainment in Late {{Ottoman Damascus}} (c.1875-1914)},
  booktitle = {The {{Arab Nahda}} as {{Popular Entertainment}}: {{Mass Culture}} and {{Modernity}} in the {{Middle East}}},
  author = {Grallert, Till},
  editor = {Auji, Hala and Cormack, Raphael and Mahmoud, Alaaeldin},
  year = {2023},
  month = dec,
  pages = {17--38},
  publisher = {I.B. Tauris},
  address = {London},
  copyright = {All rights reserved},
  isbn = {978-0-7556-4740-8},
  langid = {english},
  keywords = {Damascus,Entertainment,Era > 19th century,Era > 20th century},
}

Open Arabic Periodical Editions: A Framework for Bootstrapped Scholarly Editions Outside the Global North

Till Grallert

Digital Humanities Quarterly, Jun 2022

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This paper introduces and evaluates the project Open Arabic Periodical Editions (OpenArabicPE) as a case study of minimal computing. It confronts hyperbolic promises of mass digitization and computational methods for the exploration of digitized cultural heritage as a hegemonic episteme rooted in 20th-century, English-speaking, neoliberal capitalism from the margins. OpenArabicPE is a framework for open, collaborative, and scholarly digital editions of early Arabic periodicals from the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. It addresses the specific affordances of a historical multilingual society, whose material heritage continues to be looted, destroyed, and neglected; whose material heritage resists digitization efforts by being dependent on non-Latin scripts and, for instance, non-Gregorian calendars; and whose contemporary heirs cannot draw on the vast resources in wealth and socio-technical infrastructures of the Global North. Centered around generosity and minimal computing, OpenArabicPE is run by volunteers and currently hosts six editions with some 630 journal issues and more than 7 million words, without any funding, by re-purposing data, software, and infrastructures.
@article{Grallert2022DHQ, title = {Open {{Arabic Periodical Editions}}: {{A}} Framework for Bootstrapped Scholarly Editions Outside the Global North}, author = {Grallert, Till}, editor = {Risam, Roopika and Gil, Alex}, year = {2022}, month = jun, journal = {Digital Humanities Quarterly}, volume = {16}, number = {2, "Minimal Computing"}, copyright = {CC BY-ND 4.0}, langid = {english}, keywords = {application: 2020 MCSA-IF,applications,archived,Digital Divide,DOI: not found,field: Digital Humanities (DH),Global Digital Humanities (DH),language: Arabic,minimal computing,Politics of Digitisation,Postcolonial Digital Humanities (DH),Project: OpenArabicPE,talk: 2024 DARIAH,talk: stylometry,writing: 2023 DH in Practice,writing: 2023 stylometry,writing: 2024 Jaraid}, file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/9S66JXIP/grallert_2022_open arabic periodical editions.pdf} }

Catch Me If You Can! Approaching the Arabic Press of the Late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean through Digital History

Till Grallert

Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Jun 2021

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The essay explores the use of digital history for the systematic study of the periodical press in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean (1906 –1918) as a discursive field. It evaluates the methodological and practical challenges of digital history as rooted in the socio-technical infrastructures of the Global North when applied to the Global South. It does so using a case study of four Arabic journals from Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. After outlining the need for building a corpus and the challenges presented by this effort, this article explores a digital corpus of a total of circa 2.65 million words through (social) network analysis and stylometric authorship attribution.

@article{Grallert2021GG,
  title = {Catch {{Me If You Can}}! {{Approaching}} the {{Arabic Press}} of the {{Late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean}} through {{Digital History}}},
  shorttitle = {Catch Me If You Can!},
  author = {Grallert, Till},
  editor = {L{\"a}ssig, Simone},
  year = {2021},
  month = jun,
  journal = {Geschichte und Gesellschaft},
  volume = {47},
  number = {1, Digital History},
  pages = {58--89},
  doi = {10.13109/gege.2021.47.1.58},
  urldate = {2021-06-11},
  copyright = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
  langid = {english},
  keywords = {19th century,20th century,Arabic periodicals,Arabic Periodicals,corpus building,Digital editions,DOI: not found,Era > 19th century,Era > 20th century,event: DH2022,field: Digital history,field: Digital Humanities (DH),field: History,field: Intellectual history,field: Periodical Studies,Global Digital Humanities (DH),in peer review,Method: (social) network analysis (SNA),Method: Stylometry,Methodology/theory,Methodology/theory > Digital Humanities > Digital editions,Methodology/theory > History,Methodology/theory > History > Intellectual history,Methodology/theory > Postcolonial Studies,nahda,noNotes,Politics of Digitisation,Postcolonial Digital Humanities (DH),Postcolonial Studies,Project: Jaraid,Project: OpenArabicPE,Project: Sihafa,status: imported from Sente,talk: 2024 DARIAH,talk: stylometry,writing: 2020 DHQ,writing: 2023 DH in Practice,writing: 2023 stylometry,writing: 2024 Jaraid},
  file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/5EXGGIW8/grallert_2021_catch me if you can_geschichte und gesellschaft_47.pdf}
}

Urban Food Riots in Late Ottoman Bilād Al-Shām as a ’Repertoire of Contention’

Till Grallert

In Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa: The ’Dangerous Classes’ since 1800, Jun 2020

DOI Bib

@incollection{Grallert+2019,
  title = {Urban Food Riots in Late {{Ottoman Bil{\=a}d}} Al-{{Sh{\=a}m}} as a 'Repertoire of Contention'},
  shorttitle = {Urban Food Riots},
  booktitle = {Crime, {{Poverty}} and {{Survival}} in the {{Middle East}} and {{North Africa}}: {{The}} '{{Dangerous Classes}}' since 1800},
  author = {Grallert, Till},
  editor = {Cronin, Stephanie},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {157--176},
  publisher = {I.B. Tauris},
  address = {London},
  doi = {10.5040/9781838605902.ch-010},
  copyright = {All rights reserved},
  langid = {english},
  keywords = {19th century,20th century,Collective action,Food riot,Lebanon,noNotes,Ottoman Empire,Project: Food Riots,status: imported from Sente,Syria,writing: 2022 Entertainment},
  file = {/Users/Shared/Zotero/Till/storage/EN6CKKE2/grallert_2019_urban_food_riots_in_late_ottoman_bilād_al-shām_as_a_'repertoire_of_contention'.pdf}
}