Over the past decades, the phenomenon known as ‘Digital Humanities’ has profoundly shifted the humanistic inquiry in the Middle East. The trend embraces multiple humanitarian disciplines ranging from history to archaeology. The utmost effect of Digital Humanities is in enabling scholars to preserve, analyze, and revive research objects.
Digital Humanities develops as an extremely popular trend in the Arab world diversifying research and teaching opportunities. Aligned with computing methodologies, digital technologies provide advanced tools to study and enhance various humanities disciplines. The trend particularly concerns the Middle East and its under-25 population that has so far deeply absorbed digital culture. With the help of such programs as ‘The New Master of Arts in Digital Humanities and Societies,’ students are mastering the particulars of the Middle East digital culture. Such innovative programs enable students to become archival print scholars specializing in the Middle Eastern digital culture.
The Middle East are daily applying the vast array of digital tools ranging from textual sources , archives and repositories to electronic manuscript collections and densitometrical imaging, and modeling software. Virtually, the Middle East takes the lead in deploying digitization and visualization techniques, as well as mapping and text mining. Digital Humanities are cultivating a new scholarly ecosystem based on innovative tools and progressive research methodologies. Digital Humanities has been deeply rooted in the Middle East as a lead technological-methodical process.
The domestic scholars and researchers are deeply concerned about the preservation and revival of cultural artifacts and and heritage especially in the vulnerable regions. This challenge forced the call for pursuing innovation and technology applications in the vast array of humanities. The tech-savvy methods have generated a feasible substitution to the traditional ways of exploring physical archives, artifacts and documents. Hence, the digitalization of the humanities has profoundly disseminated the knowledge about the Islamic cultures around the globe.