In the scope of our Lecture series “History, Digitization and Archive”, we hosted our last lecture on 27 June 2023. Dr. Till Grallert, from Humboldt University of Berlin, talked about digital and infrastructual divide(s) between the hegemonic, Anglophone North and societies/communities of the Global South with a focus on Arabic as one of the main human languages and scripts. He shared minimal computing approaches to address the affordances of the digital (or lack thereof) “without the help we can’t get”: technological resistance to languages other than English, neo-colonial silencing of the cultural record, complete lack of funds, while referring to (1) creating knowledge about artefact, e.g. Project Jarāʾid (2011–), a crowd-sourced union list of all Arabic periodicals published before 1930, and (2) providing access to artefacts, e.g. Open Arabic Periodical Editions (2015–), a framework for bootstrapped scholarly editions outside the global north. Scholars from Al-Nahrain University, University of Baghdad, University of Regensburg, and guest audience attended the presentation.
