The State of Digital Humanities in the Arab World

This chapter surveys the state of digital humanities across the Arab world, arguing that despite an explosion of digital and social media data since the 2011 uprisings, humanities scholarship in Arabic/Middle East studies has been slow to engage critically with digital content and tools. It traces a wide range of practices, including archival digitization projects (the Atlas Group, Arab Image Foundation, OpenITI), data platforms like R-Shief, Arabic-language open-source software efforts (Arabeyes, Qutrub, wiki localization), independent digital journalism (Mada Masr), and a rich body of “glitch art” and new media practice by artists such as Ahmed Basiony and Bahia Shehab, who used technology to critique language, power, and political upheaval. The paper’s throughline is that digital humanities in the region sits at an intersection of art, activism, and scholarship, and that language (especially Arabic’s incompatibility with early digital infrastructures) has been a central site of both technical struggle and creative resistance.