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.

Associated Products

DigCai Database (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: DigCai Database
Author: Adam Mestyan et al
Abstract: This is the first release of a database of selected articles about Cairo's urban development, from the offical gazette of the Egyptian Government (al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah), between 1828 and 1914. In this release, we only reproduce the The articles are in Arabic and in Ottoman Turkish. All are fully marked-up XML files with the TEI standard. The making of this database was supported by a collaborative research award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RZ-286808-22) in 2022. Project director was Adam Mestyan (Duke University) and co-directors were Hugh Cayless (Duke University) and Mercedes Volait (CNRS).
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://zenodo.org/records/15255721
Primary URL Description: Zenodo storage link: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15255721
Access Model: open access

Cairo Urban News (Web Resource)
Title: Cairo Urban News
Author: Cayless, Hugh et al
Abstract: The main, searchable English-Arabic website for the DigCai database. A textual database of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish articles about Cairo's urban development from the official Egyptian government journal, al-Waqāʾiʿal-Miṣriyyah, between 1828 and 1914
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://project-cairo-urban-news.github.io/
Primary URL Description: A textual database of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish articles about Cairo's urban development from the official Egyptian government journal, al-Waqāʾiʿal-Miṣriyyah, between 1828 and 1914.

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