The following people are associated with the Digital Humanities Institute – Beirut 2019:
Elie Abu Haydar (AUB) born and raised in Beirut, has been interested in software development since his high school years.
With a degree in Computer Science and as a software developer, he built up his experience with several companies and institutions ranging from startups to well established ones.
At AUB University Libraries, Elie contributes and is seriously involved in various digital projects that include but not limited to automation, digital collections, digital preservation and research and development leveraging where possible open source and community driven technologies. As an attendee at DHIB and DHSI, Elie describes his experience as very fruitful and influencing.
Kamal Abou Mikhael (AUB) is a linguistics graduate student at AUB and has previously earned an MS in Computer Science from the same institution. Although he has transitioned into linguistics, he has continued to use his programming skills and Unix-based tools in his research projects. He is the founder of greekarabicnt.org, a project to align the Smith & Van-Dyck Arabic translation of the New Testament with its corresponding Greek text. His current thesis work is a corpus-linguistic analysis of the metaphoric use of prepositions in the letters of Paul the Apostle. He can be found on Twitter as @kamaLdotAm.
Janneke Adema is a Research Fellow in Digital Media at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University) aka The Post Office. she has a PhD in Media (Coventry University) and a background in History (MA) and Philosophy (MA) (both University of Groningen) and Book and Digital Media Studies (MA) (Leiden University). Her PhD thesis (completed April 2015) focused on the future of the scholarly book in the humanities. she has been conducting research for the OAPEN project, and subsequently the OAPEN foundation, from 2008 until 2013 (including research for OAPEN-NL and DOAB). her research for OAPEN focused on user needs and publishing models concerning Open Access books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
List of publications: https://openreflections.wordpress.com/publications/
Mohamad Hasan Ali Al Amine (AUB) Graduated from the American University of Beirut majoring in Computer Science. Product Owner at DiasporaID, CTO of janoubia.com one of the top 10 news sites in Lebanon and Founder of Sahhatips an online health and fitness news portal. Certified project manager and a fullstack developer, specialized in managing high traffic websites running on WordPress.
Alyssa Arbuckle (UVic) is the Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria. In this role with the ETCL she serves as the Project Manager for the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, and assists with the coordination of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Alyssa is also an interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholarship and its implementation. She holds a BA Honours in English from the University of British Columbia and an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where her previous studies centred around digital humanities, new media, and contemporary American literature. Currently, she explores open access, digital publishing, and how we can share academic research more broadly. To this end, Arbuckle’s work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among other venues, and she has recently co-edited a book collection and accompanying website titled Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities.
Jason Boyd (RU) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. He is affiliated with Ryerson’s Master of Digital Media program, and the joint Ryerson-York University graduate program in Communication and Culture. He is co-Director of Ryerson’s Centre for Digital Humanities. He is the former Digital Projects Manager at Records of Early English Drama (REED), and has taught project management at Digital Humanities Summer School at the University of Leipzig and at DHSI@Congress.
Youssef Doughan (AUB) a computer science graduate, is a Digital Imaging Specialist in the Digital Initiatives and Preservation Services Department at American University of Beirut University Libraries. Youssef is a professional photographer who participated in exhibitions in Lebanon and UK and he is the winner of Jubran Tueiny Foundation prize in photography in 2014. To see more of Youssef Rached Doughan’s photography, visit: ydoughan.500px.com or facebook.com/yrdphotography or follow him on Instagram: @ydoughan
Shady Elbassuoni (AUB) is an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of the American University of Beirut. He received his PhD from Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Germany. Before joining AUB, Shady was a postdoctoral researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Shady’s current research spans multiple areas including Machine Learning, Information Retrieval and Crowdsourcing, and their applications for Public Health and Digital Humanities.
Randa El Khatib (UVic) is the Assistant Director (Open Knowledge Initiatives) of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) and a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Victoria. She is the also the Managing Editor of Early Modern Digital Review. Working on plays and epic poetry of the English Renaissance, Randa’s research focuses on how space is represented in fictional and allegorical settings. Her work also focuses on the concept and practice of prototyping in the digital humanities and across the disciplines. She co-founded DHIB in 2015.
Rami Farran (AUB) the director for IT Academic Services overseeing teaching, research and outreach part of the IT organization at AUB. He holds an Executive Masters degree with a computer and communications engineering undergraduate background. He has extensive experience in eLearning and Student Learning Experience Design, in addition to extensive experience in Software Design, Software Architecture and High Performance Computing. Under his capacity, Rami is overseeing all eLearning and distance learning activities, course and program design and redesign, innovation in student learning experience, eLearning governance and support, Computational Research, in addition to Learning Management System end-to-end implementation, operations and support.
Till Grallert (OIB) (@tillgrallert) is a historian and research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut. He is interested in the social and spatial history of late Ottoman cities and wrote his thesis on the streets of Damascus (Freie Universität Berlin, 2014). His current research project aims at establishing a genealogy of urban food riots in the Eastern Mediterranean between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. In addition, he developed a strong interest in digital humanities and the socio-linguistics of early Arabic newspapers. He works on open, collaborative and scholarly digital editions of early Arabic periodicals such as Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas and ʿAbd al-Qādir Iskandarānī’s al-Ḥaqāʾiq in the framework of his research project “Open Arabic Periodical Editions” (OpenArabicPE).
Tracy Chapman Hamilton’s research focuses on late medieval and early modern visual culture in Europe and the Mediterranean, especially rooted in questions of gender studies, collecting, spatiality, and material culture. How women made themselves visible through patronage is the subject of her book Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321) and collection, Moving Women Moving Objects (300-1500), co-edited by Mariah Proctor-Tiffany. She is currently working on a series of articles, her second book, and a digital project, Mapping the Medieval Woman. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kress and DuPont Foundations, the International Center of Medieval Art, and was the first Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities at The Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Kristen Doyle Highland (AUS) is Assistant Professor of Literature in the English Department at the American University of Sharjah. Her research areas include spatial humanities and mapping and digital pedagogy. While completing her PhD at New York University, she and a colleague founded NewYorkScapes, a research community dedicated to using digital methods to examine the literary and social history of New York City. At AUS, she incorporates digital text analysis, mapping, and digital collaborative writing in her literature and writing courses.
Albert Haddad (AUB) holds a BA in Public Administration from AUB and a Master’s degree in Information & Library Science from Rutgers University New Jersey. He joined AUB in 2006 and started as a Library Assistant in the Reference Department. In 2014 Albert became a Reference & Instruction Librarian in the Research & Instruction Services Department. Albert is responsible for the Reference services, gives instruction sessions, works on the collection development and is the University Libraries Springshare administrator.
Jeffrey W. McClurken is Professor of History and American Studies and Chief of Staff to the President at the University of Mary Washington, where he also oversees IT. The Princeton Review named him one of The Best 300 Professors in 2012 and he was the 2014 Teaching with Technology winner of the Virginia State Council of Higher Education’s Outstanding Faculty Award. Dr. McClurken is co-Principal Investigator on the Mellon-funded, COPLACDigital. He sits on the review board for the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and is the Digital History Reviews editor for the Journal of American History. He co-chairs the Digital History Working group for the American Historical Association. His work and teaching can be found at mcclurken.org.
Maike Neufend is a Research Associate and Lecturer at CNMS, the Centre for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at University Marburg (Germany). Her current research explores the Aesthetic Formation of the Social by looking at contemporary practices of Sufism in Beirut. Her research interest include aesthetics, emotion/affect, uncertainty and crisis as well as history of ideas with a focus on Lebanese and Syrian society. She co-founded and co-edits the peer-reviewed online Journal: Middle East – Topics & Arguments, https://meta-journal.net. Here, she is working on Open Access strategies in the field of Middle Eastern Studies and in particular evaluating and rethinking the ways we produce research and publish it.
Dalal Rahme (AUB) is a Data Services Librarian at AUB Libraries and an instructor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the Lebanese University teaching Digital Preservation. She holds a Master’s in Information Science from the University of Illinois with a concentration in Data Curation and Socio-Technical Data Analytics. As a data services librarian she assist AUB research community in managing and curating their research data in effective ways. She is involved in licensing, organizing, documenting, pre-processing, analyzing, archiving and sharing research data. Her areas of interest include open science, scholarly communications, data curation, data viz and digital humanities.
Jack Reed (SU) is Geospatial Web Engineer, Stanford University. Jack works on increasing access to geospatial data at Stanford University Libraries. A contributor to open source software, Jack is active in the IIIF, library, and open data communities. He also serves on the executive committee of The International Association for Geoscience Diversity.
Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna) is a Universitätsassistent für Digital Humanities at the Department of History, University of Vienna. His dissertation (Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan, 2013) studied how modern computational techniques of text analysis can be applied to the study of premodern Arabic historical sources. Currently, he works on the study of “The History of Islam” (Taʾrīkh al-islām) by the Damascene scholar al-Dhahabī (d. 1348 CE), which will serve as the methodological and infrastructural foundation for the study of the entire extant corpus of Arabic biographical and historical tradition. Additionally, he is working on a series of foundational projects for the field of digital Islamicate humanities, which include 1) a machine-readable corpus of classical Arabic texts (openiti.github.io, 2) a large-scale text-reuse project (kitab-project.org, and 3) a gazetteer and geographical model of the classical Islamic world (althurayya.github.io).
Jan Rybicki (JUK) is Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He has written extensively on the application of quantitative methods in the study of literature, tracing the stylometric signals of authors, translators, genres and genders in literary texts in several languages. Together with Maciej Eder and Mike Kestemont, he is a co-author of the “stylo” package for R, which has become a well-known tool of stylometric analysis. He is also an active literary translator; he has translated some 30 novels from English to Polish by such authors as John le Carre, Kazuo Ishiguro or William Golding.
Nabila Shehabeddine (AUB) is a Research and Instruction Librarian at Jafet Library, American University of Beirut, Beirut – Lebanon. She received her MS (2005) in Library and Information Science from Simmons College in Boston, MA. She provides library instruction in the form of sessions and workshops for faculty and students during the academic year, generates online research guides, and participates in other activities.
Ray Siemens (U Victoria, Canada; http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/) is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English and Computer Science, and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing (2004-15). He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (2004, 2015 with Schreibman and Unsworth), Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007, with Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (2012, 2015; MRTS/Iter, Wikibooks), Literary Studies in the Digital Age (2014; MLA, with Price), and The Lyrics of the Henry VIII MS (2018; RETS). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, serving as a member of governing council for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and recently serving as Vice President / Director of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (for Research Dissemination), Chair of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, and Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.
Chukri Soueidi (AUB) has more than 10 years of professional experience in software development. He is Microsoft most valued professional (MVP) awardee for the years 2014, 2015, 2016. Also, author of the book “Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials” published by Packt in 2015.
David Joseph Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhab) (@DJWrisley) is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is interested in digital methods for literary studies (particularly text mining and geovisualization), open corpora as a form of social knowledge creation as well as AI applications in the humanities. His work in digital humanities has focused on under-resourced domains and multilingual environments. He co-founded DHIB in 2015.
Hicham Zahnan (AUB) is a Web Applications Developer at the American University of Beirut (AUB) Libraries. He holds a BS in Computer Science from AUB. He has been involved in multiple projects with the library since 2014, implementing different web applications and using several content management systems. His recent project is Kamal Joumblatt digital archive that was developed on Drupal 7.
The Organizing Committee:
Najla Jarkas (AUB) is a Senior Lecturer at the English Department at the American University of Beirut. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Reading, UK. She has been assuming different roles in DHI-B since its inception in 2015. She has introduced and is teaching the first undergraduate Digital Humanities courses at AUB: ENGL. 2556B Introduction to Digital Humanities and ENGL 256D Doing Digital Humanities. She is chair of the Digital Scholarship Committee and Member Coordinator for Digital Liberal Arts Programs at AMICAL Consortium. She is currently working on a Digital Humanities project on the Orientalists.
Maya Sfeir (AUB) is currently a part-time lecturer in the English Department at the American University of Beirut. She holds a joint PhD from the Sorbonne University (France) and the Lebanese University (Lebanon), as well as two MAs, one in English Literature from the American University of Beirut and another in Applied Linguistics from the Lebanese University. Her research interest focuses on exploring the literary-linguistic interface, in particular dramatic texts, using digital and corpus tools. She has attended summer and training schools on corpus linguistics and empirical approaches to literary studies at Lancaster University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. She has also presented her research at a number of national and international conferences.
Digital Humanities Institute - Beirut 