As part of The Digital Orientalist‘s annual open call for the 2026–2027 academic year, we will be highlighting the different teams that make up our publication. Here, we spotlight our Middle Eastern Studies team.
These spotlights are intended to provide a sense of the breadth of work that fits within each area rather than to define strict thematic boundaries. We welcome proposals on any aspect of digital humanities and area studies.
A note from our editors, Maria S. Thomas and Tiziana Pasciuto:
We invite contributions from scholars using digital tools, methods, and computational approaches to study the interconnected textual, visual, and material cultures of the Mediterranean, West Asia, and Eurasia. We particularly welcome work situated within, across, or beyond fields commonly identified as Middle Eastern, Biblical, Byzantine, Syriac, Armenian, Caucasus, Persian, and Turkic Studies.
These fields encompass an extraordinary diversity of languages, scripts, media, and cultural traditions, spanning manuscript cultures, epigraphic and documentary archives that together resist easy classification within inherited disciplinary or regional boundaries. Rather than constituting a unified object of study, they are shaped by layered histories of transmission, translation, and scholarly segmentation.
We therefore seek to showcase research that not only applies digital methods to these rich and heterogeneous materials, but also critically reflects on the epistemological and methodological consequences of doing so. This includes attention to how digital infrastructures (databases, standards, algorithms, and interfaces) mediate access to sources, shape interpretive possibilities, and implicitly encode particular assumptions about language, periodisation, geography, and cultural affiliation.
We encourage contributions from researchers who wish to reflect on their experiences working with digital methodologies, tools, and interfaces, as well as from those interested in critically reviewing existing digital projects, databases, and other resources in the field from the perspective of their users—as researchers, educators, and interested public. We particularly welcome contributions that interrogate the relationship between computational innovation and humanistic interpretation, considering both the possibilities and the limitations of digital approaches.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Languages, scripts, and translation: Multilingual, multiscript, oral, and low-resource language materials, including developments in OCR, HTR, NLP, AI, and translation workflows, as well as challenges of representation, training data, and linguistic diversity. Contributions addressing evaluation, reproducibility, bias, and the adaptation of computational methods to historically and linguistically complex corpora are especially encouraged.
- Archives, data, and metadata: Digitisation practices, cataloguing systems, dataset creation, metadata design, and the critical examination of archival silences, colonial classification systems, and alternative epistemic and organisational frameworks. This may include linked open data, interoperability, authority control, knowledge graphs, and FAIR data principles.
- Resources, platforms, and workflows: Critical reviews and reflections on digital collections, databases, repositories, tools, interfaces, visualisations, teaching resources, and research workflows, including their design, use, and limitations. We also welcome discussions of software development, collaborative infrastructures, open-source practices, and research software as scholarly output.
- Mapping, movement, and circulation: GIS and spatial humanities approaches to maritime, archipelagic, diasporic, transregional, environmental, and infrastructural connections, including the study of mobility, exchange, and networks. Network analysis, temporal visualisation, and computational approaches to historical connectivity are likewise within the scope of this theme.
- Community, memory, and heritage: Participatory archives, local knowledge practices, public history initiatives, museum collections, cultural heritage platforms, and strategies for preservation and engagement with communities. Contributions exploring co-creation, community-led documentation, indigenous and local knowledge systems, and questions of restitution and digital repatriation are especially welcome.
- Ethics, access, and sustainability: Issues of ownership, representation, repair, infrastructure, digital inequality, environmental impact, long-term preservation, and the ethical responsibilities of digital scholarship. We also encourage reflections on responsible AI, transparency, openness, accessibility, and the long-term sustainability of digital research infrastructures and scholarly communities.
If this resonates with your work or interests, we invite you to apply to join us as a contributor!
For more information on the roles available and how to apply, visit our general call for applications here.
The deadline for applications is July 19th, 2026. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us directly at digitalorientalist@gmail.com.