Digital Cairo: A Study of Urban Transformation, 1828-1914

FAIN: RZ-286808-22

Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
Adam Mestyan (Project Director: November 2021 to present)

Preparation of a digital database and interpretive website about the modernization of Cairo between 1828 and 1914.

We request funding for a two-year (2022-2024) Scholarly Digital Project in the Collaborative Research grant competition. In this project, the participants study the impact of capitalism and bureaucratic agency from pre-industrial to industrial Muslim-majority urban societies through the example of nineteenth-century Cairo, the capital of the Egyptian province in the Ottoman Empire. A historian, a digital humanities specialist, five students at Duke University, and international collaborators in France and Egypt investigate this research topic through the creation of a born-digital tool (an XML TEI database of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish newspaper articles) and an HTML website about Cairo’s urban transformation. The products will include articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as the born-digital, peer-reviewed, and freely available dataset, short interpretative essays, and visualizations on the website, hosted by GitHub and double-stored at Duke University Library.