Majd Al-Shihabi and the mission to produce more knowledge and archives in Arabic

'''Episode 12 of Whose Voices? podcast | Mar 13, 2023'''

Majd Al-Shihabi and the mission to produce more knowledge and archives in Arabic

Reviewed by Bruna Damiana Heinsfeld Introduction:

You are listening to Whose Voices, a podcast from Whose Knowledge?.

Jake Orlowitz:

Hi, this is Jake. I'm here at the Decolonizing the Internet's Languages conference, and I am sitting with Majdj. Majd, please tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to this conference.

Madj Al-Shihabi:

My name is Madj Al-Shihabi. I'm a Palestinian-Syrian-Canadian technologist, urban planner, and Free Culture advocate. I was also the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture fellow in the past year. And through that fellowship, I got the opportunity to work on a few projects related to open culture and open access and archives in general. And those questions about archives and the way that we access them and the questions, ethical questions that it raises, is what has brought me here. Because one of my projects is called Palestine Open Maps, and I'm working with Colonial Maps made of Palestine in the thirties and forties. And I'm using those maps in order to understand Palestine as it was before colonization. And this is a very important way of adding nuance to the discourse of Palestine. And I think this has introduced a lot of questions on how to deal with colonial archives because those maps were not made for us, for us as Palestinians. So the idea is that we have to interrogate those archives in a different way and read them in a way that is against the archival grain.

Jake Orlowitz:

Thank you so much for that introduction. In addition to working with maps and reframing or recreating maps based on different interpretations of history or colonialism, what else are you doing with language online in Arabic and in your community?

Madj Al-Shihabi:

So one of the questions that arose from the maps is that there are a lot of place names in those maps that are mentioned that are more nuanced than just the village name or the city name. They're the names of lands, the names of owners of lands, and things like that. But the names were recorded in the maps in a transliteration from Arabic to English. And one of the aspects of this project is actually reversing the transliteration. And that has been a very interesting process because that process is non-trivial at all. And it takes a lot of training for your ear to actually pick up on the transliteration process and reverse it. I'm also involved in different groups that are trying to promote the production of new knowledge or the recording of knowledge in the Arabic language that involves contributing to Wikipedia, but also other wikis like Wiki Gender or the Archive of the Missing and Disappeared, creating new narratives or compiling narratives about the Civil War in Lebanon in a way that speaks to a larger Lebanese public.

And all of that is related to the production of knowledge in the Arabic language because the Arabic content of the internet is such a minuscule amount compared to the knowledge that is present on the internet. And it's very disproportional to the number of Arabic language speakers. And that doesn't include the many other languages that are present in our communities but are not represented in our online forms. So in Syria, we have a lot of Syrians and Kurds and Cherkess and many different languages that have online presences, but they're still marginalized even more than Arabic is.

Jake Orlowitz:

So when you look at Arabic and those other languages online, what kinds of content do you find and what's missing?

Madj Al-Shihabi:

In Arabic? We have a crisis of knowledge production in the entire world because most knowledge production is centered around the English language, and Arabic is not an exception to that. So whatever is online, there is a lot of content, but I wouldn't call that knowledge. There's a model of understanding content. That content evolves from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. There's a lot of data in Arabic on the internet, a huge corpus of language. A lot of people have noticed that the dialects of Arabic have benefited a lot from the internet because they are starting to become written. Whereas previously, only Modern Standard Arabic was written. That transcription of dialects has become normalized, which is a huge step that we have taken in normalizing it, but it's still data and maybe information, but we haven't aggregated that and turned it into knowledge that then we can use to create positive change in our societies. So what is missing? I think there's that step of turning our data into information and our information into knowledge and eventually wisdom. And the other aspect is that our archival material is present online, but it's not searchable because the search terms are not designed in a way that we can interrogate it in the Arabic language. So you have the British Library or the Met Museum with enormous online digital collections in the Arabic language, but we can't access them because they're institutionally segregated away from us.

Jake Orlowitz:

So when you look at what's missing, I guess the other side of that coin is what do you wish you could create in Arabic online, and what are some of the barriers that are getting in the way of that?

Madj Al-Shihabi:

A huge part of what's missing is the technical tools and epistemic frameworks that will allow us to take our archives and make them accessible and allow greater engagement in them that will then create positive change in our societies. And to me, being able to involve a large segment of people in one archival creation and to activating those archives is a crucial step in building a democratic society. And that's something that we need right now because historically, there has been, in the past half a century, there has been a very systematic process of destroying democratic institutions in the region. And our mission in creating new archives and documenting whatever is missing is that we are engaging a larger public in the democratic process of building new archives and activating those archives in order to understand ourselves better. So what I wish was there are more tools and more experimentation in different archival methodologies that then we can apply in our local contexts

Jake Orlowitz:

In this work to increase the presence and the accessibility and usage of archives, what's working, and are you stuck or inhibited by anything in your efforts? You know, are your efforts working?

Madj Al-Shihabi:

A lot of the efforts are experimental, so a lot of them do work, and many of them don't. So it's very hit-and-miss, but I'm very hopeful about participatory methodologies of archival creation. So one example that I'm very inspired by is the Wiki Gender, which is a wiki created by a group of feminists from Egypt and Palestine and Syria and Lebanon, and Tunis. And they've been creating new content and compiling material about feminism in the Arabic-speaking world and doing all of that in Arabic first instead of writing it in English and then translating it. So that's a very successful experiment, but I see a lot of unsuccessful experiments such as, I don't want to name names, but there are experiments where people are putting archives online, but they're all on Facebook, for example. And there are documented cases of Syrian revolution Facebook pages that have recently, very recently actually, been taken down because of the changes in Facebook's policies without informing the original authors of the page, without any consultation with the Syrian community. And we have the original materials, but all of the interaction and the discourse that happened around those materials and that was generated by those materials is completely gone. So to me, that's one of the dangers of relying on big companies such as Facebook to be the repository of our archival knowledge. And I want us to be experimenting of ways that we can take the conversation out of Facebook and move it into other spaces.

Jake Orlowitz:

Thanks so much for explaining both sides: what's working, and also, I guess, the lessons you've learned from some of the missteps or mistakes even. We've just wrapped up two days of the Decolonizing the Internet's Languages conference. How did you find the experience of being here and being with so many other people who are interested in these issues?

Madj Al-Shihabi:

The experience has been very inspiring because I know that there are a lot of people working and struggling with the same questions, but at the same time, knowing that intellectually and feeling that and seeing that in person is a completely different experience, and it's very reaffirming that, yes, I'm asking the right questions. Yes, there are people who are in solidarity with me, who will help me out in my process of discovering my way or my community's way of doing decolonization. Meeting those people in person has been invaluable.

Jake Orlowitz:

Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up? Anything you'd wanna share or say?

Madj Al-Shihabi:

I hope that this is not a once-a-year event, that we take the knowledge and bring it back home and take the process of decolonization into our local contexts and turn that into an active dialogue that then we can contribute globally.

Jake Orlowitz:

Thank you so much, Majd.