This week I have been digging around in the #InternetArchive looking for digitised Arabic periodicals. With a bit of #Rstats and far too many hours with #XSLT and #TEI/XML spent on identifying titles based on the very patchy metadata provided by uploaders, there are quite some exciting finds.

The API returned some 4500+ items for the keywords "جريدة", "مجلة", and "صحيفة", of which I could identify 781 as pertaining to 100 individual Arabic periodicals published before 1930. Links to all of these have been uploaded to #Wikidata, which will increase their visibility to scholars and the interested public.

There are, of course, thousands of items for which I couldn’t programmatically establish a title with sufficient certainty, let alone try and link them to existing records without actually looking at the digital facsimile and reading the information provided on front-pages and mastheads.

Check out https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/wnywBGxzyyiukWWYiIQqi0smeUCu6AggKG4mOME68i3 to see the results.

#ArabPeriodicalStudies #PeriodicalStudies #DigitalHumanities

This week I have been digging around in the #InternetArchive looking for digitised Arabic periodicals. With a bit of #Rstats and far too many hours with #XSLT and #TEI/XML spent on identifying titles based on the very patchy metadata provided by uploaders, there are quite some exciting finds.

The API returned some 4500+ items for the keywords "جريدة", "مجلة", and "صحيفة", of which I could identify 781 as pertaining to 100 individual Arabic periodicals published before 1930. Links to all of these have been uploaded to #Wikidata, which will increase their visibility to scholars and the interested public.

There are, of course, thousands of items for which I couldn’t programmatically establish a title with sufficient certainty, let alone try and link them to existing records without actually looking at the digital facsimile and reading the information provided on front-pages and mastheads.

Check out https://query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/wnywBGxzyyiukWWYiIQqi0smeUCu6AggKG4mOME68i3 to see the results.

#ArabPeriodicalStudies #PeriodicalStudies #DigitalHumanities

Does anybody know anything about deduplication at the #InternetArchive? Quite frequently people upload the same files as independent items, which could be prevented by checking against checksums.

See, for example, https://archive.org/details/Om-Alqura, which seems to be an exact copy of https://archive.org/details/1320_20220730

#الصحافة_العربية #ArabPeriodicalStudies #digipres

It is also interesting to see how people spend significant time and effort to download digital facsimiles from academic repositories, edit every image, and upload them to the Internet Archive.

See, for example, scans of البلاغ الاسبوعي published in Cairo from 1926 onwards ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60578577 ). Scans of the copies held by the University of Tübingen are hosted by the University of Bonn: https://digitale-sammlungen.ulb.uni-bonn.de/ulbbnioa/periodical/pageview/7282062. Based on the position of tears and specks, I am pretty sure that these images are the source of https://archive.org/details/Elbalah-week/مجلة%20البلاغ%20الأسبوعي%20-%20العدد%20001/

#ArabPeriodicalStudies #الصحافة_العربية #remediation #digitisation

While I thoroughly enjoy the wealth of old Arabic periodicals on the Internet Archive, I am also frustrated by the state of metadata. Why do people laboriously upload thousands of individual issues but provide nothing but the **one-word** title? Don’t they want the material to be found? Is there something else to it?

Take, for example, https://archive.org/details/al-masrah_202408, which is the only known digitised copy of المسرح, published by محمد عبد المجيد حلمي in Cairo from 1925 onwards. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124972737

#DigitalHumanities peeps and #Librarians, can you recommend publications on the state of the Internet Archive’s crowd-sourced metadata?

#الصحافة_العربية #ArabPeriodicalStudies #digipres #metadata #periodicalStudies

I’ve just seen this fantastic work worth highlighting during #OAWeek: Somebody is uploading scans of Palestinian periodicals to the @internetarchive at scale: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Palestinian+Historical+Memory-%D8%B0%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A9+%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86%22 . They even add metadata at the issue level!

#CulturalHeritage #الصحافة_العربية #Palestine #Gaza #ArabPeriodicalStudies #PeriodicalStudies

I’ve just seen this fantastic work worth highlighting during #OAWeek: Somebody is uploading scans of Palestinian periodicals to the @internetarchive at scale: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Palestinian+Historical+Memory-%D8%B0%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A9+%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86%22 . They even add metadata at the issue level!

#CulturalHeritage #الصحافة_العربية #Palestine #Gaza #ArabPeriodicalStudies #PeriodicalStudies