How can we critically examine, interpret, and repurpose colonial knowledge through creating structured data? Can colonial texts serve as meaningful data sources to explore the histories of understudied regions like the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf? How can historical sources be transformed into datasets, and what insights can such data offer? This symposium addresses these questions and marks the OpenGulf research collective’s completion and publication of a comprehensive dataset of geocoded place names derived from a seminal early-twentieth-century British colonial Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula, and Oman. This open-access, historical-geographical dataset is the culmination of seven years of collaborative annotation, geolocation, and disambiguation carried out by faculty, students, and OpenGulf community members across several institutions. During the sessions, we will discuss OpenGulf’s collaborative workflows and methods, introduce potential uses among scholars and practitioners, and emphasize the pedagogical potential of historical dataset creation by celebrating the work of student researchers. 

In addition to morning sessions at the David Rumsey Map Center, the event will feature an exhibition of historical materials related to the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf at Branner Library and a student-led poster session including lightning talks on undergraduate research.  The afternoon event will include cartographic visualizations created using the OpenGulf dataset such as the one pictured here, a map of mentions of over 66,000 camels in the Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia.

Scholars, students, and members of the public with an interest in advancing and broadening their knowledge of both the history of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf and digital humanities debates and methodologies will especially benefit from this event.

Please register to attend.

PROGRAM

9:00-9:10am Morning Session Welcome

Nora Barakat (Stanford University) and David Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi)

9:10-10:25am Session 1: Introducing the Lorimer Dataset 

Chair: Zephyr Frank (Stanford University)

1. Nora Barakat and David Wrisley: Workflow as Socio-Technical Problem: The History of the Lorimer Dataset

2. Nada Ammagui (Sharjah Art Foundation): Zooming In: Leveraging Asynchronicity & Adapting Research Modes

3. Ali Uğurlu (Columbia University): Disambiguate and Discover: In the Tracks of Lorimer's Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf in Eastern Arabia and Oman

10:25-10:45am Coffee Break

10:45am-12:00pm Session 2: Research with and through the Lorimer Dataset

Chair: Kären Wigen (Stanford University)

1. Camille Cole (Illinois State University): Reading Lorimer in Baghdad: Mixed Source-Base Digital Projects on Ottoman Iraq

2. Nada Ammagui: Zooming Out: Seeing the Bigger Picture in Quantitative Datasets

3. Mustafa Günaydi (Stanford University): Digitizing the Past: Knowledge Production on 19th- and 20th-century Iraq in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English

The program continues after a lunch break. See more details about the afternoon program.