Turath: Arabian Peninsula Digital Archive

FAIN: HAA-287905-22

President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)
Rosie Bsheer (Project Director: January 2022 to October 2025)
Lauren Montague (Co Project Director: September 2022 to October 2025)

The design and development of a prototype of a digital library repository of archival materials on the history of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

Turath is a collaborative, community-centric, and open-source digital archive project that aims to curate a repository on the Arabian Peninsula’s history while building tools for the readability and searchability of Arabic texts. Focusing primarily on local sources from the last two centuries, Turath will collect, digitize, and visualize the records, periodicals, photographs, and audio/video recordings related to the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Turath will also further historical knowledge of the Indian Ocean, East Africa, South Asia, and the United States, and enhance our understanding of such global phenomena as modern capitalism, religion, urbanization, and global warming. Committed to the values of the humanities, Turath prioritizes universal accessibility for researchers while foregrounding and providing a platform for local communities in the peninsula to highlight their roles in history-writing and facilitate their own legacy-making through community archival collections.