As there are no existing datasets on Palestinian literature, the absence of precedents and the extreme fragmentation of the data sources encouraged PalREAD to chart its own path. PalREAD’s novel methodological approach – a synthesis between digital methods together with textual, reception, trend, and network analysis – has not been applied to Modern Arabic Literature before, not to mention to a case of displaced production such as Palestinian literature.
The development of the customised database to house the project’s corpus of undigitised non-machine readable archival material allowed the project team to engage in novel ways of conducting analysis. Furthermore, the development of the visualization tool allowed the team endless opportunities to cross-check and refine the data, as well as widely share project findings in an interactive online visual format. Mixed methods of data entry and analysis are now possible and include datamining, data visualisation, quantitive and qualitative analysis, content analysis, network analysis, and trend analysis, all supported by the custom-built visualization tool developed specifically for the PalREAD project. In this way, the data sets compiled for PalREAD are a unique contribution to the field, providing the groundwork on which future scholars interested in the intersections between modern Arabic literature and Digital Humanities can build.
PalREAD tackled the history of Palestinian literature as an important case study for the exploration of transnational frameworks of analysis for inherently exilic literatures. A transnational understanding of Palestinian literary history contributes to the development of a more entangled perspective on modern Arabic Literature more specifically, and exilic literatures more broadly.
Through this lens, Palestinian literature allows the possibility to read together national and exilic literature, encouraging cross-disciplinarity, exloring new ways to write nonlinear and nonconventional literary histories of displacement and movement, exposing unexpected constellations, networks, trajectories, relationships, and collaborations; working across multiple literary geographies; and revealing just how multilayered literary histories can be. In this way PalREAD facilitated a timely engagement with histories of displaced literatures, fostering new perspectives and methodologies that can tackle the realities of literature and people in motion. It also forged new paths of inquiry by making available to readers and users the project’s innovations, tools, oral histories, research, and findings.
In light of the loss and destruction of Palestinian literary sources, oral history and interviews played an important role in filling the gaps in knowledge and facilitating a more nuanced understanding of Palestinian literary history. The PalREAD project produced and launched ten audio interviews in Arabic with key literary and cultural figures. The audio interviews, sixty minutes each, were professionally recorded, edited, and produced. The interviews are also available as part of a podcast series on mainstream podcast channels.
