Bibliographic metadata for cultural and literary Arabic magazines (1870-2023) based on ارشيف الشارخ

This repository contains machine-actionable bibliographic metadata for more than 300.000 articles in 309 cultural and literary Arabic magazines published between 1870 and 2023 and based on the website ارشيف الشارخ للمجلات الادبية والثقافية العربية. Prior to 2019, this website was available at https://archive.sakhrit.co/.

background

Periodicals are compound texts and there are, to my knowledge, no concerted efforts to provide searchable metadata for Arabic periodicals below the bound copy, such as issues, rubrics, and articles. The only exceptions are a few editions of individual periodicals, back-issues of newspapers in their publishers’ archives, and ارشيف الشارخ للمجلات الادبية والثقافية العربية. This website provides metadata including titles, authors, issue number, and publication date for more than 300.000 articles in 309 cultural and literary magazines published between 1870 and 2023, with the vast majority dating to the second half of the twentieth century. ارشيف الشارخ, thus, enables an unprecedented search for authors and their articles across multiple journals.

ارشيف الشارخ also provides digital images of all magazines in its collections. However, it must be noted that the proclaimed scans of original copies cannot be relied upon without additional checks. They have rendered at least one entire volume of المقتبس (al-Muqtabas, Q12193626) based on the defective digital text from المكتبة الشاملة in a original-looking layout and serve them as “fakesimiles” (Grallert 2022, sec. 14). Other facsimiles are of such a low resolution to render them absolutely illegible.

ارشيف الشارخ was set up by and, with the move to the new URL, finally named after Muhammad al-Sharikh (Q6892907), a Kuwaiti businessman and founder of the Sakhrit software company that developed the first Arabic OCR software.

purpose of this data set

Unfortunately, ارشيف الشارخ is a silo disconnected from the larger knowledge ecologies. The website neither makes the bibliographic data available beyond their graphical web interface, nor do they link to external authority files.

The current data set aims at mitigating both points. The main purpose is to make the bibliographic metadata collected by ارشيف الشارخ available in open and well-established serialisations for computational analysis and integration into bibliographic information systems. To this end, we provide the entire data set and various subsets as CSV, BibTeX, and TEI/XML. Other serialisations can be easily generated.

The initial goal in creating this data set was the diachronical analysis of co-citational networks of authors who published in the same periodical issue.

Large as it might be, the ارشيف الشارخ data set covers only a sliver of the Arabic periodical press. In order to integrate these data into large information ecologies and the semantic web, we aim at reconciling as many entities as possible with existing authority files and knowledge graphs, most notably Wikidata. This work has been completed on the journal level. Here we have reconciled all publications with Wikidata items created hundreds of new items for periodicals, which had not yet been found there. Reconciling all of the 61885 distinct authors in this data set is beyond the scope and capability of the current endeavour. I have, however, started reconciling the most important authors (determined by betweenness centrality and degree in the aforementioned social network analysis) for the period between 1870 and 1930.

documentation

Detailled documentation for this repository and the data set can be found in the docs/ folder.

licence

It is our conviction that bibliographic metadata cannot be copyrighted. We conceive of all data in the data/ folder as being in the public domain (CC0).

The documentation is published as CC BY 4.0 and code is covered by the MIT license.

references

Grallert, Till. 2022. “Open Arabic Periodical Editions: A Framework for Bootstrapped Scholarly Editions Outside the Global North.” Edited by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil. Digital Humanities Quarterly 16 (June). https://doi.org/10.63744/w9dk2dm7m92p.