Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME)

Description

The Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) is a collaboration between the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) at the University of Exeter and the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University, building upon the 2019 Memorandum of Understanding established between the two institutions. By using new technologies to digitise selected parts of the University’s collections of material from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the project aims to open up a series of research questions about the potential for digitisation in advancing research.

The MENA Special Collections at Exeter include over fifty distinct archival collections relating to the Middle East, such as the papers of Sir Charles Belgrave, Sir John Wilton and Sir William Luce (British colonial history in the Gulf), the research materials of Jonathan Crusoe (Iraq/Kuwait), the papers of John Shebbeare and John Craven Wilkinson (modern Omani history), the letters of Nabih and Adil al-Azmah (nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt, Palestine and Syria), the academic papers and correspondence of Nazih Ayubi (covering political Islam, public administration and economic theory in Egypt and the Middle East), and the research materials of Abd al-Fattah M. El-Awaisi (especially valuable for early interviews with members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood), the Omar Sheikhmous archive (twentieth-century Kurdish political history), and a considerable number of personal archives relating to the modern histories of Palestine and Israel, including some major photographic collections.

In addition to this, further material is held in the Arab World Documentation Unit (AWDU), a specialist reference collection of around 100,000 items, of international importance, that is housed within the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies.

As part of the DAME project, thousands of items from both the archives and AWDU are being digitised and added to the DAME website, which has metadata in English and Arabic, and Kurdish where relevant. The primary aim of the project is not that of creating digital content, but of exploring how digitisation can assist research into the history of the MENA region. It is however expected that the Digital Archive of the Middle East will become a vital digital resource for future scholarship, providing an online platform through which our collections will be made more accessible, as well as linking to other digitised archives and encouraging international partnerships and regional collaborations. There also three PhD students and two post-doc researchers working on the project. 

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2021

Contact details

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Categorisation

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University affiliation(s)

University of Exeter
Exeter

University of Exeter
Exeter