Author: houssamalmas

Orientalism is viewed as the interpretation of the Eastern world, be it in art history, literature, or cultural studies; such an interpretation has been set in place by artists and scholars from the West. This view tends to emphasize, exaggerate or even distort the image of Arabs and Arab culture, as it is construed by Western critics. Although it began ages ago, Orientalist views still delineate a lot of contemporary stances on the Middle East and Arab world, whether in plain sight, or emergent propensities that have been repressed. We see Orientalism in the way Westerner’s sing their songs, write their books, or simply speak of the Middle East.

Our team has decided to look into Orientalism as a work of intellectual history; we are curious to know why these views still hold true today, to a certain extent, and why they still affect the way the West (and the rest of the world), sees the East. In order to do so, we decided to analyze multiple relations regarding orientalist authors because we wanted to understand the meaning behind this topic and see how it affects us now and how it will affect us later.

We started our project by creating a copy of the master spreadsheet that we  used to analyze and interpret data; it is organized in a sense to include the author’s names, nationality, title of work, text category and date of publication. We used Palladio, since it is a great platform for this project and is typically used as a visual organizer. It allowed us to create different maps for different relationships, necessary for our data collection. Palladio helped us delve into the complex relationships between the information inserted in the different categories.  It is important to keep in mind that our analysis from the networks are limited to the data we accessed from the master spreadsheet and we should not generalize on behalf of other uncollected data analysis. 

  The research questions we chose were: 

1. What major findings do we get when mapping the Orientalists?
2. Is there a relation between the author’s nationality and text category?
3. Which dates of publication are most dominant with each text category?
4. Which text category emerges as the most representative in this group?
5. Is there an obvious connection between the author’s nationality and category?
6. What is the link found between the author’s category and text category?
7. Is there a relation between the author’s nationality and date of publication? 
8. Is there a correlation between author’s nationality, text category, and author’s category? 

After choosing our research questions, each team member researched different articles written about Orientalism. We each chose the ones that we found most interesting. The three diverse articles we chose were: “Orientalism: Past and Present” by Tobias Hübinette, “Orientalism: It’s Origins and Politics” by Nancy Demerdash, and “Orientalism: Then and Now” by Adam Shatz. Reading these articles enabled us to educate ourselves more about what Orientalism was really all about, and more importantly how it started and what role it plays in today’s world. 

The analysis section of our project was the most time-consuming yet the most interesting part. 

1. Relation between the author’s nationality and the text category:

We noticed a few vital things that can help us in our research for the project. One being that the most dominant orientalist author nationality is British. The British authors mostly focused on writing fictional work, translation, and travel. They barely wrote about history, religion or the military. The American orientalist authors, on the other hand, mainly focused on fictional writings, and barely wrote about children literature, travel, or religion. We also observed that only three French orientalist authors are available in our data. Two of them focused on writing about fiction while the remaining authors wrote about travel.Another observation was that German orientalists mainly focused on writing fiction, and only a few authors wrote about religion or translation. Lastly, Multinational orientalists focused on writing both fiction and history fiction, they barely wrote about history or travel. Upon observing our networks with the help of Palladio, in the end of analyzing this research question, we saw that almost all orientalists wrote about fiction. Also, most of the authors are either British or American. To further elaborate on this, in the article “Orientalism: Past and Present” by Tobias Hübinette, the author mentioned that as long as Western countries remain dominant, the concept of Orientalism will always exist. As we previously observed in our data, the most frequent orientalist authors belonged to Western countries. Therefore, this shows us that orientalism is strongly embedded into the Western image to the extent that their power over the globe thrives off of it.

2. Relation between the publication dates and text categories:

For this research question, we decided to group the different publication dates into centuries; in order to study the most and least frequent text categories written by orientalists over the years. During the 18^thcentury, barely any orientalists published their work; however, those who did were very few. 

Orientalist authors only wrote about fiction and travel during this century. Nevertheless, we saw that they flourished during the 19^thcentury. Their work was mostly fictional; however, they also wrote about travel, translation, and history. The 20th century was a bit similar to the prior one. During the 20th century, Orientalist authors mainly focused on fictional writings, but they also wrote about travel, religion, history. In our current century, the 21st century, orientalism is still relevant; however, we noticed a significant drop in the work published during this century. With the help of our data, we were able to observe only two works related to history published in 2007 and in 2015. Therefore, not much orientalist work is being published at our time due to the evolution of the digital world; or we do not have enough data on the master spreadsheet in order to see if there are more works published that we haven’t collected information on; or we might actually find out that these writers are no longer called orientalists. We will never know unless we collect more data and analyze deeper, therefore we recommend that future semesters should work on developing the data on the master spreadsheet and focus on collecting more data on orientalist writers from our century. 

3. Relation between the publication dates and the author’s nationality: 

During the 18th century, the predominant orientalist authors were mainly from the United Kingdom. Based on the data, there was no presence of any other nationality during this period. Whereas during the 19th century, the orientalist publications flourished. Many nationalities joined the United Kingdom, among them were authors from the United States and Germany. In addition, there were other nationalities that had a minor presence such as France, Syria and Lebanon. In the 20th century, the orientalists from the United Kingdom were still leading in terms of the  author’s nationality. In addition, the number of the United States publications increased. Other nationalities like Russia, Hungary, Tunisia and Lebanon had a minor presence during this period. Unfortunately, in the century we live in, the number of publications has dropped significantly. With a presence limited to orientalists from the United Kingdom and Romania.

The most prevalent and difficult thing our team has faced during this project was the availability of data. When we first started discussing the topic of Orientalist authors and looking for relations to uncover, it felt like the spreadsheet in our hands was not the perfect source of information to rely on. As a team, we were capable of identifying very limited relationships between the authors and mapping them via Palladio; however, this wasn’t enough to come up with ideal analysis and conclusions.Therefore, we decided to look at different articles which cover the concept of Orientalism. With the help of these articles, we were able to look at the uncovered relations in a very coherent way, for we understood the meaning of Orientalism in-depth.  Although not all the information we gained was relevant to the data we analyzed from the master spreadsheet, we still picked up on a few vital points that helped in our analysis. We have incorporated our articles in the analysis section where we saw fit to. 

In conclusion, this project helped us become very familiar with the concept of Orientalism. We undercovered multiple hidden relations and noticed how the Orientalism remains with us even though it is not quite the same as the Orientalism discussed in the past. From the data provided, we noticed that it was limited in terms of geographical spread. The majority of the publications were from the UK, and little importance was given to other nationalities. On the other hand, all the data collected focuses mainly on orientalist publications from the 19th and 20th century. Furthermore, our team is going to give multiple suggestions so that students who will take this course in the future can use this as a point of reference and not be limited to a certain amount of data. This is why students should focus on finding additional data regarding a wider geographical scope. Also, students should work on looking for orientalist work published during different centuries and not just the 19th and 20th century. This means that they will be able to look at diverse results and analyze their findings properly. Students can even observe our current century and understand how the concept of Orientalism has evolved and how it remains valid up until today.  All of these suggestions will make the students’ work much more reliable as they tend to cover all aspects of the topic related to Orientalist authors and their work. 

This blog was written by Razan Muqattash, Lara El Hariri and Houssam Almaz Zounji.

We are a team of three students, at the American University of Beirut, who are driven by the passion of learning. Razan and Lara are Business Majors, while Houssam is a Civil Engineer. Working all together, we never expected to be a part of a team that got along so smoothly, it was like a puzzle put together. Each one of us had a talent that we projected onto this course & project, we each split the work evenly, and gave in our input whenever needed. This course has taught us about an entire world we didn’t know off, Orientalism, and we couldn’t have been more thankful of that because it taught us years of history. What we could all say we especially learnt from this project, besides Orientalism, was merely how to work so efficiently as a team, and how to bring our analytical skills to life. These are both extremely useful skills to have in our future courses and jobs.

References: 

• https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/142842028614283279971914_BarnumBailey_WizardPrincenohed666.jpg
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p__8DcjRSm0yVNpY5t0STCtSENHWzLWp6zk-reyEYQI/edit#gid=0
• http://www.tobiashubinette.se/orientalism.pdf
• https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/introduction-becoming-modern/issues-in-19th-century-art/a/orientalism
• https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now/
• https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio-app/
• https://media.tenor.com/images/9417a4f73400757a7c38961507017728/tenor.gif
• https://media0.giphy.com/media/1oJRI1mXSDiDtX8QBv/200.gif
• https://www.aljazeera.net/file/GetImageCustom/be4e8ebe-eb1d-41d0-8e93-2f019521bbb2/1200/630

Snake charmers, carpet vendors, and veiled women may conjure up ideas of the Middle East, North Africa, and West Asia, but they are also partially indebted to Orientalist fantasies. To understand these images, we have to understand the concept of Orientalism, beginning with the word “Orient” itself.

We understand now that this designation reflects a Western European view of the “East,” and not necessarily the views of the inhabitants of these areas. We also realize today that the label of the “Orient” hardly captures the wide swath of territory to which it originally referred: The Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. These are at once distinct, contrasting, and yet interconnected regions. The reason we study the topic of Orientalism, or why it is of importance to us, is that it is a view of the past that could help us understand/affect our contemporary views. Though we would like to think that Orientalism has vanished, it still exists in many forms today. We see it in the way Westerner’s sing their songs, write their books, or simply speak of the Middle East. Thus, we care to discuss it here today.

To begin with, our team met with Dr. Jarkas online to get an idea of how we should organize and layout this project. We created a copy of the master spreadsheet that will be used to analyze and interpret data; it is organized in a sense to include the author’s names, nationality, title of work, text category, author category and the date of publication. Palladio is a great platform for this project for it is typically used as a visual organizer. It allows us to create different maps for different relationships, necessary for our data collection. It requires the use of an excel spreadsheet to assemble all the information prior to our presentation. Palladio can help us delve into the complex relationships between the information inserted in the different categories.

Next, we decided to list a few research questions in order to pinpoint which aspects we will focus one when analyzing the data from the spreadsheets on palladio. This step is vital to our project because it forms a timeline for us highlighting the different categories we will analyze using the bivariate analysis form. The first research question we picked was a general and broad one, What major findings do we get when mapping the Orientalists. We chose this research question in order to pick up an analysis from our first instinct when we open up the map on palladio. Here, we jotted down all the different and not necessarily correlated analysis we picked up on without deeply looking into the different categories and comparing them to one another.

After completing this step, we decided to focus on the four columns in the spreadsheet that had the possibility of common cells. The three columns were authors nationality, text category, authors category, and date of publication. Making this important decision helped us move a step closer in our project and led us to coming up with research questions that best suited the type of data we were dealing with.

Some of the research questions were “Is there a relation between the author’s nationality and text category?” , “Which dates of publication are most dominant with each text category?”, and we ended our research questions with an analysis of three columns that may show a relation between each other “Is there a correlation between author’s nationality, text category, and author’s category?”.

Once we prepared our research questions, we began with the following step, observing our networks on Palladio. The first research question we analyzed was the relation between the authors nationality and the text category. Here, we noticed a few vital things that can help us in our research for the project. One being that the most dominant orientalist author nationality is British. The British authors mostly focused on writing fictional work, translation, and travel. They barely wrote about history, religion or the military. The American orientalist authors, on the other hand, mainly focused on fictional writings, and barely wrote about children literature, travel, or religion. We also observed that only three French orientalist authors are available in our data. Two of them focused on writing about fiction while the remaining authors wrote about travel.

Another observation was that German orientalists mainly focused on writing fiction, and only a few authors wrote about religion or translation. Lastly, Multinational orientalists focused on writing both fiction and history fiction, they barely wrote about history or travel. Our final and most important analysis was that almost all orientalists wrote about fiction and a large number of the authors were either British or American. 

The second research questionwe analysed was the relation between the publication dates and the text categories. For this research question, we decided to group the different publication dates into centuries; in order to study the most and least frequent text categories written by orientalists over the years. During the 18^thcentury, barely any orientalists published their work; however, those who did were very few. Orientalist authors only wrote about fiction and travel during this century. Nevertheless, we saw that they flourished during the 19^thcentury. Their work was mostly fictional; however, they also wrote about travel, translation, and history.The 20th century was a bit similar to the prior one. During the 20th century, Orientalist authors mainly focused on fictional writings, but they also wrote about travel, religion, history. In our current century, the 21st century, orientalism is still relevant; however, we noticed a significant drop in the work published during this century.

With the help of our data, we were able to observe only two works related to history published in 2007 and in 2015. Therefore, not much orientalist work is being published at our time due to the evolution of the digital world.    

Lastly, we analyzed the relation between the publication dates and authors nationality. Like the previous research question analysis, we grouped the different publication dates into centuries. During the 18th century, the predominant orientalist authors were mainly from the United Kingdom. Based on the data, there was no presence of any other nationality during this period. 

Whereas during the 19th century, the orientalist publications flourished. Many nationalities joined the United Kingdom, among them were authors from the United States and Germany. In addition, there were other nationalities that had a minor presence such as France, Syria and Lebanon.

In the 20th century, the orientalists from the United Kingdom were still leading in terms of the  author’s nationality. In addition, the number of the United States publications increased. Other nationalities like Russia, Hungary, Tunisia and Lebanon had a minor presence during this period. Unfortunately, in the century we live in, the number of publications has dropped significantly. With a presence limited to orientalists from the United Kingdom and Romania.

Last but not least, the integration of Palladio technology in our analysis seemed to be very beneficial allowing us to visually display the relationships between the data categories. The visual interpretation of data made the analysis of the data smoother and more efficient as we were able to highlight the contribution of the orientalists based on their nationalities, the genre they wrote about, and the year of publication. Therefore, this project helped us understand the concept of orientalist authors further as well as how they evolved. We noticed that the concept of orientalism is still with us; however, the orientalism of today is not quite the same as the orientalism discussed in the past. 

References: 

http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio-app/#/upload

As mentioned by Study.com “Whenever you send an email, read a social media post, or take pictures with your digital camera, you are working with digital data.”

These days, digital data is everywhere. Digital Data has become an essential part of our daily life. Sending an email, chatting over WhatsApp, taking and sharing pictures over Instagram are all forms of digital data. Nowadays, Internet has become a basic need. With just a few simple clicks, we can discover an endless world of data either in form of text, photos and videos.  Bernard Marr , an enterprise tech expert at Forbes says: “ The amount of data we produce every day is truly mind-boggling. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things.”

On a personal level, I was always passionate about Data and the Digital World. I remember sitting beside my father while working on his Windows 2002 computer. I was always eager to know more about this machine, and how we can implement it in something useful. At the age five, my father traveled abroad and left me his computer. I used to sit hours, trying to discover it, trying to get to know more about its functionality; even though it was not even connected to the outside world through internet. Around the beginning of 2004, I learned about Skype and I was amazed by the fact that we use our computer to connect to the outside world and video call someone abroad. I used to go to the electronics store to buy internet cards “Cyberia Internet Cards” and connect my computer to the internet using our landline. I remember the first time I saw my father live through the computer screen, and it was like a dream at that time !

At my eighth grade, I started watching tutorials on YouTube about coding, and I remember creating my first mobile game “Fly and learn prime numbers” for a competition. The game was about facilitating prime numbers learning, it was more like a clone for a well-known game at that time “Flappy Birds”, where the kids have to let the parachute pass through the cloud holding a prime number. You can access this game at : http://arcade.gamesalad.com/g/119599.

Later on, I started producing some graphic designs as a freelancer for several startups. This ranged from creating logos to creating user interface for applications and websites. My last project in the Digital world was creating my own startup website for women’s clothing luxeclothing.co , I just finished my website at the beginning of this semester . As for now, I am facing the burden of competing with other well known websites in this niche, and looking for creative ways to market this website using Social media (Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook) and Google ads. At the beginning, I thought it was easy to see results and conversions on my site directly after I launch it, but now I am discovering how difficult it is to gain the confidence of the customers and to convert them from site visitors to potential buyers.

Nowadays, the world of digital data is continuously evolving. According to Bernard Marr “Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.”. Everyday, tons of data is being generated and the technological advancements are growing at an exponential rate. Ten years ago a video call was more like a dream ! So where do you think the digital technological evolution is going to take us in the next ten years ?

Works Cited

“How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read” https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/

“What is Digital Data ?” https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-digital-data.html