Jana Alkadri
Research Mentor(s): Sophia Mo
Mentor Department: Romance Languages and Literatures
Authors:
Session: Session 5 (2:00pm – 2:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 68
Abstract
“Transcribing, translating, and organizing periodical files,†lays the groundwork for a larger digital humanities initiative that aims to make Arabic-language periodicals published in Algeria and Egypt more accessible via an OCR-searchable database. It is a project that stems from Prof. Sophia Mo’s book project, Rescripting Liberation from the Margins, which is a feminist historiography of Algeria’s War for Independence (1954-1962) and its first post-independence regime (1962-1965). During this era, the Front de libération nationale (FLN)—Algeria’s vanguard revolutionary party—integrated itself into a coalition of “Third World,†Pan-Africanist, and Pan-Arabist revolutionary movements (especially in Egypt) that provided mutual aid. Sensationalized images of female freedom fighters (mujahidat) helped establish Algeria as a global model for anticolonialism. Yet the mujahidat’s intellectual work in revolutionary periodicals shaping transnational anticolonial culture remains understudied. To better track how these women were represented and how they represented themselves, this project involved transcribing and organizing a set of documents previously scanned from various 20th-century revolutionary periodical archives in Arabic from Algeria and Egypt. Among the periodicals transcribed and catalogued include El Moudjahid, Al-Mus?awwar, Akhir sa’ah, Al-Kawakib, Al-Hilal, Al-Adab, Al-Majalla, Al-?ayat, and ?awa?). Creating transcribed and OCR-readable files involved manually creating image files, uploading them to Google Drive, opening each image file as a Google doc, and then proofreading and compiling the auto-generated transcriptions. These transcribed files were then linked to a searchable index on Google spreadsheets.
