Text Encoding Innocents Meet the Egyptian Gazette

Abstract

This short piece describes an experimental course at Florida State University in which undergraduates digitize issues of a turn-of-the-century Egyptian newspaper. Beginning students of Middle East studies can benefit from exposure to raw primary sources. Learning to read and process this newspaper using digital methods such as character recognition and text encoding, they generate a repository of text that can be of value to scholars in the field. Training students to do this work certainly offers them valuable, transferable technical skills. The combination of technical and conceptual work in a collaborative, laboratory setting is not easily accomplished, however. From an area studies perspective, it can be challenging to train students to discern what material is of significance, and how they might proceed to analyze it. Nevertheless, a great deal of knowledge in our field is produced incrementally, provisionally, and collectively. We can use institutional moves to re-imagine teaching to involve even inexpert students in this process of knowledge production.