English 240: Literature of North Africa and the Middle East > The Arab Comix Project


Beta version 0.2d (last update: 20 November 2016)

N.B.: In addition to carefully reading the rest of this page carefully, please see the Updates page for November 15 for further instructions about how to proceed.)

This project centers on Arab and Arab-diaspora comics and graphic novels. Over the last few months, I've collected a few recent examples of Arabic graphic fiction, the names of several other prominent or emerging authors, some well-known online venues that publish and disseminate comics, and a bunch of links: historical background, reviews or previews of individual works, profiles of artists & writers, news reports about the burgeoning comics/graphic novel scene in the Arab world (including the Arab diaspora), etc. Finally, I have a very short working bibliography of scholarly history and criticism. Much of what I've collected is represented below.

Each of you now has an "assignment" (a particular author, a particular anthology, a print or online comics mag, a current or historical topic) that will require you to research, read, and think. (How? I've provided a few guidelines below, but in the absence of any other parameters, I'll invite you to use your imagination and initiative.)

I want you to present what you've found and/or read and/or thought about in an interesting way, using some combination of words, images, and "Digital Humanities" tools (audio, video, maps, storymaps, timelines, annotations, data visualizations, etc.). Will your work be informative? Yes. Will there be a critical or interpretive component? Ideally, yes. A creative component? Possibly, especially insofar as figuring out effective ways of using DH tools to enhance our critical understanding of your text/topic/author involves thinking "creatively." Should you somehow connect or address your work to one or more of the aims or themes or texts of our class? Sure. Of course, answers to the preceding questions will depend partly upon a) what you've found, both in relation to your subject and in relation to DH, b) what possibilties those discoveries and/or technologies afford us, and c) how they inspire you. We will collect all 18 of your projects under one big class website, using Weebly.

Again: here are some links to online resources about Arabic comix and graphic novels that I've collected so far. (I debated about how many of these to give you, since I want you to do most of the research here, after all. With that in mind: some of the following links may disappear eventually. But they're here for now.)

Background/History/Introduction:

Resources/Links:

Online Venues:

News/current & forthcoming titles:

Looking for hand-picked suggestions or recommendations of digital tools--or for an inspiring selection of crack examples of cool things that undergrads (or others) have built with such platforms? Keep scrolling down, below the next horizontal rule. First, here are general introductions and bigger collections of tools:

Overviews/Introductions to DH:

Resources/Clearinghouses/Project Showcases:

Tools:

  • HSU's Digital Media Lab (more here)
  • Bucknell University's "Tools for DH"
  • DiRT Directory: Digital Research Tools
  • Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative
  • Stanford University's Humanities 3.0: "Tooling Up for Digital Humanities" (How-To's/Workshops)
  • Northwestern University's Knight Lab developed Storymap.js, Timeline.js, Juxtapose.js, and other free, open-source tools
  • Google has developed a number of widely used tools, including Google Fusion Tables (also used to build custom maps), Google Slides, Google Sheets, LucidChart, etc. (How to find them? Er...Let Me Google That For You)
  • Beyond that: employ your best web search skills to figure out how else to create and use
    • blogs and websites (e.g., Augmenting Realities)
    • annotations (e.g., Annotorius; see also The Engine Room's "Platforms for Annotating Text Online")
    • maps
    • storymaps
    • timelines (Timeline.js, TimeMapper, TimelineSetter, Tiki-Tok, Dipity.com, etc.)
    • charts (Chart.js)
    • word clouds (e.g., Wordle, Voyant)/concept maps/mind maps, and other types of "data visualization" (e.g., FusionTables; see also: Visualizing Palestine),
    • audio (e.g., podcasting sofware, Audacity, Spotify, Soundcloud, etc.),
    • video (e.g., YouTube, Camtasia, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, etc.--but also slideshows and animations)

Here's where I'm collecting tools, projects, and ideas that caught your attention (or mine):

  • Kat is interested in podcasting (and in a WordPress plug-in for converting text to braille), but she isn't yet sure how she might incorporate podcasts into this project (and I'm not sure how we'd use the braille plug-in, especially since we're not using WordPress).
  • Jack is excited by Storymaps.js (especially the "tracking of the cyclist Pantani because it uses pictures, videos, and a timeline to capture each moment of his ride through the mountain") and Timemapper (especially the "Archeology of Wine" project). He's trying to imagine specific ways to use one or the other of those tools in presenting his research on scholarly "centers" and other institutional initiatives related to graphic fiction. (Me, I like the "Gigapixel Storymaps," as they seem to be well suited to annotating visual art. But Jack may be more interested in "mapping" the geographical locations of all of those academic centers, in which case plain-vanilla Storymaps--or some more ordinary type of mapping tool, like Google Fusion Maps--would be a better choice.)
  • Eleanor has kindly compiled an annotated webliography of interesting tools and projects:
    • Media, Popular Culture, and Communication Rights Research Guide: Comics & Graphic Novels
      http://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=295905&p=1975637
      This site may be helpful in finding (Arabic) graphic novels that are somehow related, in order to trace influences and/or compare/contrast certain aspects of each author's style/message. 
    • UCLA's Digital Humanities Projects: Mapping Literary LA
      http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002h27qf
      While I'm not entirely certain how I would apply such a format to Baddawi (perhaps, depictions of symbols/recurring motifs from the novel?), I think the project is aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow. 
    • Marqueed Image Collaboration & Markup Tool
      https://www.marqueed.com
      Marqueed gives the option to not only annotate with text, but to draw on images. This may be helpful to highlight certain parts of the illustrations that require additional (visual) explanation. 
    • Philaplace: The Historical Society of Philadelphia website chronicles Philadelphia neighborhoods was developed by Joan Saverino, a Penn Folklore grad.
      http://www.philaplace.org/
      The interactive map may be used to depict the setting of Baddawi, or any other graphic novel. Philaplace's includes stories, photographs, and other documents––I'd like to use similar sources in order to provide further context for the novel.
    • Digital Humanities: Mapping and Spatial Methods
      http://guides.library.upenn.edu/c.php?g=476112&p=3255816
      The page provides a selection of tools and projects that scholars may use to better argue, or represent the significance of a space and place in human cultural and social structures. 
  • Finally (for now), Michael has been trying to figure out the potential of one particular type of digital tool for weeks and weeks now, and thinks he may finally have it. Let me lay it out for you (and switch to the first person). Back in July, I read on M. Lynx Qualey's Arabic Literature (in English) blog about a pilot DH project called "Spotifying Arabic Literature," dreamt up by a Columbia grad student. Nice concept, I thought, and promising--but in practice it seemed sort of thin and vague and undemanding. (I'm so critical.)

    Looking for similar assignments that might require a bit more intellection, I stumbled upon an older project, "The Mixtape Assignment," by an instructor at Occidental College. Somewhat better conceived, but I still wasn't sure how we could adapt it for our purposes. And then I found Largehearted Boy, a blog devoted to the intersections of literature and music, in whose Book Notes series "authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book." So far, LHB has persuaded over 1000 authors--including some pretty big names--to take part. The main Book Notes page provides links to three spans in the series: 2005-11, 2012-14, and 2015-present. (There's also a link to the blogger's favorites.) One of the most recent entries in the current series, David Lida's Spotify playlist for his One Life: A Novel, is really good. So is (ahem) Raja Alem's Spotify playlist for her novel The Dove's Necklace.

    Different authors adopt different approaches to constructing their playlists, but for my money, the best ones—and the ones most pertinent for our purposes—are those that construct a “soundtrack” to the book in question: they find songs that somehow relate to or comment on a pivotal moment in the plot, that express what a character is feeling in some significant episode, or that address the book’s theme in a “meta” sort of way. In other words, the choice of a piece of music is an interpretive act. If your assignment involves working with a text, then you yourself could perform a similar series of interpretive acts. Yeah?
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