Dear colleagues,
My name is Elie Dannaoui, Assistant Professor at the University of Balamand - Lebanon. I would like to thank you for facilitating these types of communications and reflections. Just few words about my research interests and activities. Few years ago, it was not easy for us to defend being at the same time involved in both Humanities and "Sciences". I say "defend" or maybe "justify" to describe a spontaneous attitude when questioned about having a multidisciplinary profile like cases similar to mine (doctorates in History and in Computer sciences). It seems that some implicit attitudes tend to become more explicit, and what we feel as Digital Humanists homogeneous has the chance to be seen as it is or at least not stereotyped and judged a priori as heterogeneous. I fully agree with Claire when she talks about recovering identities.
Well, regarding my research interests, they are maybe a little bit far from the interests of the list members, I concentrate mainly on Arabic. My activities are oriented towards two objectives:
1) Arabic digital publishing mainly of the Arabic heritage. This field remains neglected and less studied. Huge efforts still to be paid on this level to follow the efforts of standardisation and scholarly editing.
2) Arabic corpus building and analysis. Currently I work on building a corpus of the Arabic Gospels translated since the 8th century. New technologies are being used in this project and many levels of analysis are being integrated.
I am sure that this community will be very helpful in supporting our efforts in promoting Digital Humanities in Arabic studies and among Arabists and Arabic scholars.
Best regards,
Elie
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Elie DANNAOUI, PhD
University of Balamand, LEBANON