Project History

This website and its database is the result of the “Digital Cairo: Studying Urban Transformation through a TEI XML Database, 1828-1914” project, led by Adam Mestyan (Duke University), with co-directors Hugh Cayless (Duke University) and Mercedes Volait (CNRS, INHA). It was financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities grant RZ-286808-22, between 2022 and 2025.

The “Digital Cairo” project was part of the general research program “The Making of Modern Cairo, 1800-1914” (La fabrique du Caire moderne, صناعة القاهرة الحديثة ), hosted by the French Institute for Oriental Archeology (Institut français d’archéologie orientale, Ifao, Cairo), between 2018 and 2026, led by Mercedes Volait and Adam Mestyan. This program has been jointly supported by Ifao, the Visual and Textual Information unit at the French National Art History Institute (L’information visuelle et textuelle en histoire de l’art : nouveaux terrains, corpus, outils – InVisu, CNRS, INHA, Paris), the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Cairo, the History Department of Duke University (Durham NC, USA), and the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Office of Global Affairs’ Andrew W. Mellon Endowment for Global Studies at Duke University between 2018 and 2021. It had been conceived in two workshops on digital humanities and the urban history of the Middle East at the INHA in Paris and at Duke University in 2017.

“The Making of Modern Cairo” program included social media outreach to the general public: we ran a website with popular monthly blog posts in English-French-Arabic and have a Twitter account (@cairemoderne) with about 850 followers (as of September 2024). Our activity has also stimulated new projects in Egypt and outside of it.

As part of this general program, in early 2020 Adam Mestyan asked Hugh Cayless, senior programmer and philologist at the Duke University Libraries and the Treasurer of the Text Encoding Initiative, to help him to teach and explore TEI usability for Arabic newspaper articles that Egyptian researchers – Sarah Fathallah Garaa, Karima Nasr, and Rizk Nori, have started to collect and transcribe under his and Volait’s direction in 2019. Throughout the pandemic year(s), Cayless devoted one hour every week to this project, teaching two undergraduate students at Duke University (Danah Younis and Nour Kanaan) to use TEI and discussing the particular problems. Mestyan also involved Arif Erbil, a graduate student in the Religious Studies Department at Duke at the time, to copy the available issues of the Ottoman Turkish edition of al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah. Hugh Cayless became a prized collaborator and thus Volait, Mestyan, and Cayless together designed the project “Digital Cairo” to create an Arabic news database about the urban development of Cairo in the long nineteenth century, based on al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya, the official journal of the Ottoman khedivate of Egypt. We used both the Ottoman Turkish and the Arabic issues of this remarkable journal.

As an important part of the “Digital Cairo” project, between 2022 and 2024, Cayless and Mestyan trained fourteen students and researchers at Duke University, in Turkey, and in Egypt in how to use the Oxygen software and GitHub for editing Arabic XML documents using the standard mark-up vocabulary of the Textual Encoding Initiative. The project also had two external reviewers, Will Hanley (Florida University) and Till Grallert (Freie University), who every half year participated in a meeting and helped the project directors with useful feedback. From 2022, next to Sarah Fathallah Garaa, a permenant researcher in the project was Dr. Ahmed Kamal whose expertise in Arabic and TEI XML greatly advanced the project. Please find the full list of contributors here.

An important product of this project was also the collection of available copies of al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah in Egypt and outside of it (see the Jara’id chronology), and the financing of digitization, or at least request of digitization, of some copies where the host institutions were invested in public access. We are most proud of our financing of the early issues found in the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and the large digitization of microfilms by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) at our request.

In the present website, we publish the urban news our researchers collected, marked up, edited, control read, compared with the originals and finally cleared (see the process here). The first batch consists of selected Arabic articles between the years 1244-1299/1828-1882 and selected Ottoman Turkish articles between the years 1263-1267. (While our work was ongoing, new Ottoman Turkish issues in the 1290s/1870s became available due to the CRL digitization campaign but we did not have the capacity to work on these issues yet.)