By Dr Beth Mills, Digitisation Assistant
Since July 2023, I have been working as a Digitisation Assistant on the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME), a collaboration between the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) at the University of Exeter and the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University. The project explores how digitisation can facilitate research into the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while using digital technologies to make items from the University’s substantial MENA collections openly available online, reducing barriers to access and research. This blog post by DAME Project Manager Dr James Downs outlines the scope of the project and the significance of the materials; others provide detail on specific collections and subjects represented within them.
The Digitisation Assistants take ownership of the digitisation process for individual items, from capturing the photograph to uploading the final file to the web-publishing platform, Omeka. This is the second digitisation project on which I have worked at Exeter, having held previous positions on the Hardy’s Correspondents project. In this blog post, I outline the DAME digitisation workflow, the kinds of material that I have digitised, and the importance of the project.
Workflow
I and the other Digitisation Assistants work between the workstations at the Old Library and the Digital Humanities (DH) Lab on Streatham Campus. The standard setup comprises a Canon EOS R5 camera fixed to a height-adjustable stand and connected to a desktop PC, two independently controllable lights, and a platform where each item is placed for photographing. The specialist equipment in the DH Labs is ideal for photographing a broad range of items, from oversized documents, such as maps, to 35mm slides. We use Capture One software to take and edit the images—straightening, correcting distortion, and balancing exposure as needed—before exporting them as JPEGs (for texts) or TIFF files (for visual materials, such as posters, postcards, and photographs).
Adobe Lightroom has proven handy for its image-stitching capability, as some Egyptian film posters in the collection were too big to be captured in a single image, even with the larger DH Lab workstation.
For documents, we convert the JPEGs into OCR-readable PDFs using ABBYY FineReader. However, it is not always possible to do this, as not all the languages represented in the collections are widely supported by OCR tools yet.
The final step is to upload the items to Omeka and add metadata (in Arabic, English, and Kurdish), such as title, format, relevant dates, and subjects, and add them to item sets, which include the Kurdish Digital Archive, History of the Gulf, specific archival collections (Omar Sheikhmous, Chris Kutschera, Al-Azmah), and others. The project generously funded a year of evening language classes, which have enabled me to add basic metadata in Arabic. So far, I have digitised over 4,300 items for DAME.
From archive to website
The materials selected for digitisation in DAME have great historical, political, and social value. Mostly produced in the twentieth century, they bear witness to historical currents in the region, from the rise and fall of colonial administration to nationalist politics, from increasing prosperity and large-scale development projects to revolutionary movements and everyday lived experiences. Many items are ephemeral, such as circulars issued by popular groups calling for expressions of solidarity from supporters; written for a short-term purpose with no view to longevity, they are a rare glimpse into the urgencies of the moment.
Other items were created to last. Annual reviews by Saudi ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) summarise the activities of the company, including economic and social investments—for example, the building of schools—as well as oil production. Governmental publications provide details on broad areas such as education, health, and the environment: examples include Education in U.A.E. by the UAE Ministry of Education, Protecting our Environment by BAPCO (Bahrain Petroleum Company), and Silemetiya Jina [Women’s Health], a Kurmanji Kurdish booklet published in Armenia. A considerable number of statistical books and censuses from across the region have also been digitised: multiple volumes of censuses in Iraq from 1957, statistical yearbooks from 1970s and 1980s Oman, and a statistical guide to Jordan published for tourists in 1962 are among the dozens that have been completed so far. Such resources allow data on a range of areas, including education, healthcare, population, and economy, to be tracked across time and situated in broader contexts of regional changes.
Some of the most arresting materials are photographic. Among them are picturesque mountain and desert landscapes, and snapshots of faces, mosques, and streets from 100 years ago.
Many materials are yet to be digitised, but the increased accessibility of the thousands already on the website is, for me, both the motivation and the reward of working on the project. At its core, DAME is guided by an egalitarian ethos: that materials pertaining to the countries of North Africa and the Middle East should rightfully be accessible to the people whose histories they document. I am glad to have been able to contribute to this important and necessary work.