Have you ever wondered what it feels like to spend the night with Orientalist authors, reminiscing their Arabian and historical getaways, at times when even modes of transportation were very minimal?! Did you know that one of the authors was deemed as the first “European woman to ride through the Arabian desert to reach the city of Ha’il”?! Well, our team couldn’t have walked on this orientalist endeavor and discover such interesting and insightful information without leveraging this opportunity that Dr. Najla granted and actually choose to work on this data development project! Now, fasten your seatbelts and let the journey begin!
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As a small reminder, our project entails the data development of an orientalist spreadsheet, holding information about orientalist books authors had written such as the date of publication, text category, and even information about the authors themselves such as their date of birth, nationalities, and other professions.
Our team has chosen to work on this DH project because we are a group of members that share a common aspiration of gaining more and more knowledge about interesting topics we didn’t actually get the chance to know more about in our previous courses and even school years. So, when life gives you an orientalist DH development project, you can’t but take this opportunity as a way to gain more knowledge about such an interesting topic. Given the fact that every member came from a different Arab country (UAE, Lebanon, and Jordan), this made the project even more and more interesting to handle.
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As for the main goals of this project, developing data that focuses on gathering information about orientalist authors and their written books was our major goal, having included metrics that guided our research such as adding a link to a certain text, geolocations of a certain author’s birth and death place, and even images of the book cover and author. After gathering information about all the metrics present in the spreadsheet, we will include information about orientalist authors from other projects our classmates have worked on to eventually present a comprehensive, error-free orientalist spreadsheet. As for including other metrics, just hang in there! This issue, as well as other suggestions will be tackled as you scroll down in this blog 😉.
A small note to keep in mind: While embarking on this journey, we will be taking you to the heart of this project without going through any peripheral directions as our path doesn’t include deviations where it is mainly focused on building a comprehensive spreadsheet that details information about orientalist authors, the different books they had written, and detailed metrics that tackle information about the authors’ biographies and their respective books. In other words, no deviations were made in the making of this project!
Where All The Action Took Place: Difficulties and Measures Taken
Now, for the place you’ve been waiting to see the most! We promised you that we will take you to the heart of this project directly! Drum rolls please*
It is the place where difficulties and obstacles were faced and the steps undertaken to overcome such issues! While working on our Orientalist spreadsheet, we noticed some discrepancies and inconsistencies regarding the data present on the spreadsheet. So, what we did was try to standardize each metric to keep things smooth and consistent, allowing students in the following semesters to use our spreadsheet with ease.
For the Author’s section, We made sure the spelling of the Author’s names are correct and that the hyperlink to the respective author’s biography is correct, we also checked if the author had any other orientalist books that we can add.
For the Author’s category, We determined the category of each author based on his biography stated on Wikipedia or any other biography source. The types of categories that we used depended on their profession (for example: Soldier, Missionary).We eliminated the use of the word Author because it applies to all people mentioned on the spreadsheet. If the Author didn’t have any other profession, we added “Writer” as their profession.
In terms of the Text Category section: With regards to the Text category, we agreed on specific genres to describe the books (for example: Fiction, Fantasy, Religion, Travel..) thus standardizing the terms used for this section.
For the Date of birth/death, we limited ourselves to only mention the year of birth and death of the author without specifying the respective month and day because there are many authors with unknown months and days of birth and we want to make sure our information is as consistent as possible.
For the Notes section, we added any notes we found interesting about the respective authors that were not included in the previous columns (for example: Anne Isabella Noel Blunt was the first European woman to ride through the Arabian desert). For authors’ we didn’t find enough information about, we mentioned it in the notes section.
Unfortunately, not all the data we want about the authors could be found on the internet, therefore we ended up having some cells in the spreadsheet with “N/A”, meaning no information was found regarding this particular piece of work. However, this didn’t prove to be very problematic as the majority of the information we need was found online!
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To Our Next Batch: Make Us Proud!
We were sent some work from other groups to further expand our own spreadsheet. However, their spreadsheet had columns that differed from ours, but we still decided to use the authors they have written about and add them to our own spreadsheet. Nevertheless, the additional spreadsheet gathered by other groups held additional metrics such as images of the birthplace and death place. Having said that, as this semester is unfortunately coming to an end (wipes tears away), we will not have the pleasure of building on our spreadsheet with all the necessary data concerning the other authors’ birthplace and death place (adding links to images of all the locations and noteworthy information about these areas). This is why, we hope that the next batch of students who will be taking on the project next semester would make us proud and build on what we have already accomplished! We hope that they could proceed with filling out the columns pertaining to the images and notes of the authors’ birthplace and death place as well as adding to the resources column. We would also suggest they add information regarding their families and see if that by any chance affected their interest in Orientalism and perhaps students can also search for other Orientalist authors and add them to the spreadsheet to further expand it!
Our Orientalist Planet In A Paragraph
During our corpus development project, we as a group truly learned many interesting things about Orientalists! The first thing that pops out is how the majority of the authors are Male and from the United Kingdom, showing how interested the British people were/still are in understanding the Oriental. Through analysing the books the authors have written, it was really fascinating to see how each author had a different perception of the Oriental based on his/her own experiences ranging from war to peaceful and adventurous experiences. For instance, G. A. Henty was best known for his historical adventure stories that were popular in the late 19th century. At a deeper scope, some wrote their books at times of hardship, for example some authors were prisoners and even soldiers risking their lives to protect their respective countries such as Bolesław Prus who was arrested and imprisoned at Lublin Castle for his role in the Uprising and Alan Bott who served in the British Army as a Royal Air Force had destroyed two enemy reconnaissance aircraft on 14 and 15 April 1918, but on 22 April was shot down and taken prisoner by the Turks. Actually, there was an interesting story we read about Elias Henry Jones who was a prisoner that succeeded to act as a mentally defective person and deceive doctors in order to purify his indictment.
Now,I would just like to pause for a minute and salute all female orientalist authors who were greatly successful in their writing career at times when female rights weren’t respected. Such strong females pursued their career despite social challenges faced at such times. Charlotte Lennox is mostly remembered today as the Author of The Female Quixote, and had a long career in her own right, writing poetry, prose, and drama. It is also interesting to note out women who expressed their orientalist perspectives through painting and artwork. For instance, Elizabeth Butler was one of the few female painters to achieve fame for history paintings, especially military battle scenes.
Chapeau Bas!
Not only that, but the realization of different professions associated with writing made us realize that writing for some authors was a form of healing to them. One of the authors actually wrote several books relating to her biography at times when she had a distorted marriage life. This is truly an amazing acknowledgement related to the importance of writing and how it aids authors on their path of healing from dire times and situations. Ultimately, it was truly amazing to perceive the different journeys authors from different cultures went through along their path of writing their Orientalist books.
Last but not least, there were many orientalist authors that were familiarized with Arabic and Islam on their journey of writing oriental books such as Edward William Lane who had been studying Arabic for a long period of time to travel to Egypt and visited coffee shops and the houses of locals, attended a mosque, and familiarized himself with Islam.
Final Destination
In conclusion, we as a group have learned a lot of things about Orientalism which we believe helped us understand how ‘others’ portray ‘us’. We made sure our spreadsheet is standardized and informative, which will prove useful when students in the following semester use it to their advantage, whether to insert the data into Palladio or any other tool. We tried our best to remove all possible errors in our spreadsheet to ensure smoothness in the work of the students to come. This was a really interesting project and we would like to extend our thanks to Professor Najla Jarkas who has assisted us in this project during the ongoing pandemic without hesitation.
Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it!
This blog was done in collaboration with Serena Faris, Jana Kobrosli and I.
References:
https://media.giphy.com/media/
https://media.giphy.com/media/
https://media.giphy.com/media/
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