Digital humanities practices and archival appraisal in the contemporary Arab world

Abstract

Our paper explores ways in which contemporary scholarly practices in the digital humanities (DH) can utilize archival documents as “raw” material for analytical and digital storytelling purposes. We argue, on the one hand, that there is an interpretative potential in uncurated documents that DH practices can unlock, and on the other hand, that the archival appraisal process needs to be attentive to such scholarly reuse and the data/information value of documents. After a review of the types of collections held by New York University Abu Dhabi, and a review of the history of archival appraisal theory, we present some case studies drawing on Wrisley’s undergraduate teaching in DH using primary documents from and about the Gulf region (a small fold-out simplified map of Abu Dhabi Island, a 1940 German large format map of North-East Africa, a British travel narrative in Arabia from 1933, and Abu Dhabi phone directories from the 1970s). In the end, we argue for the strong collaboration between the archivist and the digital humanist for building and using archival collections.