Arabic Language Academia Receives Funding Boost

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency in the USA, has announced it is funding a potentially massive Arab digitization program to try and protect and promote Arabic language academic journals.

To date, unlike some other parts of the world, the Arab world has not produced any significant digital Arabic language database of journals, papers and publications. Attempts have been made, however issues with digitizing Arabic, such as software not being able to handle the language, have resulted in sub-par results.

Running alongside practical challenges, political and social changes over the past half century or so have also had an impact. Limited support from governments and their fluid  priorities have not allowed for any serious digitization efforts.

“This is especially troubling as these conditions could translate into the permanent loss of critical works by influential Arab intellectuals that still remain available only in print form.” NEH

The NEH have now announced that a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant has been confirmed to support JSTOR in a small test run of some issues of the journal Al-Abhath (“Research”).

[JSTOR are the leading global not-for-profit digital library which includes the complete archives of more than 2,300 scholarly journals spanning 70 academic disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.]

Al-Abhath is a quarterly publication of the American University of Beirut that has been running since 1948. Due to its relatively long history for the region it has been chosen as best suited for the pilot digitization program.

According to JSTOR: “The foundations of Arab nationhood are preserved in these journals,” which can “give researchers perspectives that could not be acquired from any other source.”

The pilot Al-Abhath project will be used to learn about the process of dealing with Arabic as well as costs and benefits. This will then be used to assess any future Arabic language works.

The aim of the whole project in the long-term?

“..making more accessible a corpus of Arabic-language scholarly material will not only provide contemporary scholars in the Arab world and elsewhere with crucial sources about the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa, but it will also help guard against the permanent loss of humanistic knowledge in areas of the world where such materials still remain vulnerable.”

Exciting times in terms of the preservation of the Arabic language not only for academia, but also for us translators in terms of the database becoming a record of terminology for many disciplines.