Digital Humanities in the Contact Zone: Developing Transcultural Models for Research in the Humanities
David Joseph Wrisley
American University of Beirut
8 February 2016
@DJWrisley djwrisley.com
OUTLINE:
-Introduction
-Have the Digital Humanities In Fact Always Been So Monolingual?
-Not Just a Pretty Picture: Alignments, Networks, Maps Exploring Texts or Data Derived from Texts
-Collective Multilingual Contemporary Research, or What Are the Digital Humanities And What Could They Be Doing in Modern Language Departments?
Key Terms from My Title:
Digital Humanities, Contact Zone, Transcultural, Model
PART ONE: Have the Digital Humanities In Fact Always Been So Monolingual?
Roberto Busa – Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Nabatean
ARTFL project
Biblioteca Cervantes
al-Maktaba al-Shamila
The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms Project (King’s College/Vienna) – Arabic, Greek, Spanish, Latin
Fenno-Ugrica digitization (National Library of Finland Project of Kindred Languages) – in the Ingrian, Veps, Mari, Mordvin languages
HumanitéDigitMaghreb – French, Arabic, Maghrebi Arabics, Berber
Perseus Project – Greek, Latin, Arabic (Tufts/Leipzig)
Open Arabic Project (Leipzig)
PART TWO: Not Just a Pretty Picture: Alignments, Networks, Maps Exploring Texts or Data Derived from Texts
2a. The Transmission of an Arabic wisdom text, the Mukhtar al-Hikam in medieval Europe (From Arabic to English, via Spanish, Latin and French) – alignment using LF Aligner (screen grab)

2b. Reinventing “alignment” : visualizing variant textual traditions (with S. Jänicke, Leipzig). Interactive visualization here.

2c Stylometric analysis of the same text in three corpora in parallel using R (screen grab)

Key:
Left: 50+ medieval Iberian texts. Interactive network here.
Middle: 125+ medieval Latin texts. Interactive network here.
Right: 100+ late medieval French texts. Interactive network here.
2d. Map visualizations
Colleges and Universities in Florida (map data: Hisham al-Khatib)
Querying and comparing (data combined with American Community Survey from Florida Geographic Data Library) – proximity of colleges/universities to 50%+ Hispanic communities with close up on Miami at right (screen grabs from QGIS)

2e. Literary Geographies within a Large Authorial Corpus: Christine de Pizan (1000+ points) (map data by myself)
2f. Comparative Cross-Language Literary Geographies of Marian poetry: Gautier de Coincy, Gonzalo de Berceo, Alfonso el Sabio (Old French, Castilian, Galician) (608 points) (map data by myself)
Benedictine Monasteries and Marian poetry (map data layer: Hisham al-Khatib)
2g. Comparative Arabic-French late Medieval Historiography (al-Nuwairi Al-Iskandarani vs. Guillaume de Machaut) (map data by myself, accessible color palette)
2h. Exploring Place in the French of Italy (with MA students from Fordham Center for Medieval Studies) – screen grabs from Omeka

Project Site with text-specific maps, composite maps, micro essays by graduate students and a technical essay.
2i. Medieval French Literature and Systems Theory (map: California History and Social Science Project)
PART THREE Collective Multilingual Contemporary Research, or What Are the Digital Humanities And What Could They Be Doing in Modern Language Departments?
3a Linguistic Landscapes of Beirut (Arabic, English, French, Armenian…) with mobile data collection (1000+ points) (map data by myself and ENGL 229 students)


For more maps here.
3b. Beirut Publishes / و بيروت تطبع : Thick Maps of a Century of Lebanese Publishing
For more maps here.
Non-embedded Works Cited
Abu Lughod, J. Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350 (OUP: 1989).
Al-Nuwairi al-Iskandarani, Mukhtar al-Hikam wa Mahasin al-Kalim, Ed. A. Badawi (Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos: 1958).
Biber, D. “Corpus linguistics and the study of literature: Back to the future?” Scientific Study of Literature 1(2011):15–23.
Burdick, A. D_H (MIT Press, 2014).
Collet, O. Glossaire et Index critiques des oeuvres d’attribution certaine de Gautier de Coinci. (Droz, 2000).
Drucker, J. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface Design” DHQ 7.1(2013).
Guillaume de Machaut. La Prise d’Alixandre. Ed. B. Palmer (Routledge, 2002).
Gonzalo de Berceo. Obras completas. Ed. B. Dutton (Tamesis, 1967-81).
Kinoshita, S. “Worlding Medieval French,” French Global (Columbia UP, 2010).
McCarty, W. Humanities Computing (Palgrave, 2003).
Mermier, F. Le livre et la ville: Beyrouth et l’édition arabe (Actes Sud, 2005).
The Princeton Charrette Project. Web.
Romanov, R. “Al-Thurayyā Gazetteer: An Islamic Supplement to Pleiades.” Blog. 17 March 2014.
Shohamy, E. Linguistic Landscape in the City (Multilingual Matters, 2010)
Walter, S. “Tips to Create a Contrasted and Accessible Color Palette.” Blog. 13 April 2014.
Wrisley, D.J. The Literary Geographies of Christine de Pizan (geo-data). 2015. Zenodo. DOI
10.5281/zenodo.35350