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Integrating library data into authority file
The challenges of MARC XML and inconsistent transcription practices - A recent Twitter post from my former colleague Anne Klammt made me aware of a recent relaunch of “Zeitschriftendatenbank” (ZDB), the portal for periodical holdings in German (and Austrian) libraries. Just played around with the German Union Catalogue of Serails (ZDB) \@DNB_Aktuelles Nice graphs, maps and data. #journals #linkeddata #authorityfiles pic.twitter.com/f0qVtAWA5d— Dr. Anne Klammt (\@archaeoklammt) November 30, 2021 Part of the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB), the website looks great and provides a lot of data-driven functionality, such as maps and timelines of holdings. The display language of the website itself, though not the bibliographic data, can be toggled between German and English. This is a welcome nod to international users and will certainly increase the visibility of this important portal. However, it must be noted that unfortunately the dataset of bibliographic data is not as accessible as the interface. Languages written in scripts other than Latin are provided in a variety of inconsistent transcriptions into Latin script for mostly historical technical reasons. This is not the fault of ZDB per se but it will prevent communities from the Global South from finding and accessing their own cultural heritage, which for various reasons are held by institutions in the Global North. This is especially relevant for Arabic material, as I will elaborate in the section on transliterations below. On the upside, however, ZDB supports historical political entities, such as the Ottoman Empire, for facetted browsing, which I have not yet seen in other library catalogues. Crucially, ZDB also provides...
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Mapping Arabic periodical titles between 1799 and 1929
A tutorial for mapping with R - To celebrate this year’s Day of DH (#DayOfDH20201), I want to share this draft tutorial for mapping multilingual bibliographic data sets with R. NOTES This is a draft and I appreciate any comments, questions etc. using hypothes.is. This website is generated using the default GitHub pages Jekyll workflow, which does not support a citeproc plugin. The few references are, therefore, currently not formatted. The resulting maps have been published in their own repository. Introduction Large bibliographic dataset such as the one compiled by Project Jarāʾid (Mestyan, Grallert, and et al. 2020), which comprises information on more than 3300 periodical titles, are far too large and unwieldy for manual analysis. One wants to use descriptive statistics and visualisations for a first exploration of the data set, which can then guide further scrutiny and create new research questions. Basic information for each periodical in the Project Jarāʾid data set (with very few exceptions) include the date of the first publication as well as a publication location and additional languages beyond Arabic for bi- or even multilingual periodicals. Such a data set lends itself to mapping in order to see the distribution of the number of periodical titles per location for a certain period and region. In order to visualise change over time, one will want to animate the map in some way, just as the ones below: These GIFs combine multiple maps into a single animation and show the geographic distribution of new periodical titles in rolling periods of different length (year...
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Annual report: OpenArabicPE in 2019
The work on digital scholarly editions (DSE) of late Ottoman Arabic periodicals continued within the framework of OpenArabicPE (see annual report 2017). I added a number of periodicals to the existing editions of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s al-Muqtabas (Damascus and Cairo, 1906–18) and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Iskandarānī’s al-Ḥaqāʾiq (Damascus, 1910–12) following the principles and workflows established over the last years. These are: Anastās Mārī al-Karmalī’s monthly journal Lughat al-ʿArab (Baghdad, 1911–14), Anṭūn al-Jumayyil’s monthly journal al-Zuhūr (Cairo, 1910–1913) and Abd Allāh Nadīm al-Idrīsī’s weekly journal al-Ustādh (Cairo, 1892–1893). The ability to quickly add and release a number of periodicals with full text and digital facsimiles was helped by the anonymous transcribers at al-Maktaba al-Shāmila, who reproduced the page breaks as found in the printed originals that allow us to quickly link the text to the facsimile. This is very different from both al-Muqtabas and al-Ḥaqāʾiq for which we had to add each of the 8000+ page breaks manually. Finally, I worked on a facsimile edition with transcriptions of article titles and bylines of Jirjī Niqūlā Bāz’s al-Ḥasnāʾ (Beirut, 1909–11). In the last report, I mentioned the importance of authorship attribution for the vast majority of anonymous articles if one wants to analyse the (social) network of authors and texts that form the ideosphere of the Arabic press in the Eastern Mediterranean. The, often implicit and accepted, hypothesis is that a periodical’s editors authored all articles for which they did not provide a meaningful byline. There are two issues with this hypothesis: first,...
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Annual report: OpenArabicPE in 2018
The work on the digital editions of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas (Damascus and Cairo, 1906–18) and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Iskandarānī’s journal al-Ḥaqāʾiq (Damascus, 1910–12) continued within the framework of OpenArabicPE. Contributions from our interns Manzi Tanna-Händel, Xaver Kretzschmar, Klara Mayer, Tobias Sick and Hans Magne Jaatun allowed us to release a further four volumes. Readers can find a project description in the last annual report and I will focus here on the first foray into the analysis of our corpus. One of the driving research questions behind OpenArabicPE focusses on reconstructing the ideosphere of the late Ottoman and early Arabic press through establishing networks of authors and texts published and referenced in the periodicals. With regards to al-Muqtabas and al-Ḥaqāʾiq, we ask: who published what in late Ottoman Damascus? As well as, what was read in late Ottoman Damascus? Any sort of meaningful computational analysis of the global connections between authors, texts, and periodicals as a venue for publication and review requires access to reliable standardised bibliographic metadata as a bare minimum. Unfortunately, such data is practically non-existant on the article level beyond our OpenArabicPE corpus. The situation is only marginally better on the issue level. Available metadata is not commonly provided in a standard-compliant and machine-actionable format. But even then, the vast majority of articles would remain outside our analytical scopes. Many publishers did not provide (meaningful) bylines and the majority articles in journals and newspapers from Beirut, Cairo or Damascus did not credit their authors (c.f. Table). One...
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v0.5 of (*majallat*) *al-Muqtabas*: volume 3
We just released v0.5 of the journal al-Muqtabas. This release includes structural mark-up and page breaks based on the digital facsimiles for all issues of volume 3. As always, this release comprises all previously released files. This time, however, we have also included various improvements to TEI files and the bibliographic metadata, namely links from named entities, such as persons and places, to authority files (VIAF and GeoNames). vol. 1: complete vol. 3: complete vol. 4: complete vol. 5: complete vol. 6: complete I wish to express my gratitude to the following contributors, who helped with the mark-up of page breaks: Manzi Tanna-Händel: volume 1, issues 10 to 12. volume 3, issues 8 to 12. Layla Youssef: volume 4, issues 7 to 12. Dimitar Dragnev: volume 5, issues 2 to 12.