Discussion of the texts, their contexts, places and politics.
Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1900)
St John Philby, Southern Nejd (1918)
Lady Anne Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881)
Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia (1940)
Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936)
Quick ways of finding places in a text (in English) by using regular expressions. Last term's demo. Today's demo uses the text file of Philby's Southern Nejd, a text editor (Sublime Text), regular expressions, Wikipedia, GeoNames and Sheets.
All texts are found in archive.org.
1 Review: You can access a short video with instructions on building a dataset of an itinerary while close reading the text of the travel narrative, a text editor, a Google sheet and a simple regular expression. Video here from last term (17 mins) and here from class on 6 April.
2 Apply: try this process on your text and come up with a list of places your author went.
3 Watch: Please watch this video (18 mins) in which I interview Nada Ammagui (Post-graduation Research Fellow, NYU Abu Dhabi) talking about her expertise working with digital mapping techniques and her PPTP experience studying itineraries in Lorimer's Gazetteer.
4 Write: Formulate two questions for Nada Ammagui in the DHS Chat. Complete this by 0600, 8 Apr.
5 Read: Nada Ammagui's blog post "Wādi Tāyīn: Then and Now" & "GeoNames Tutorial" (starting 3:20 for the part useful for your assignment). We will not be working with Recogito.
Mapping Itineraries with Nada Ammagui
The passage in the historical, geographical work (known as Lorimer's Gazetteer) that Nada worked on can be found here. (NYU authentication required)
Work on your itinerary dataset in Google Sheets.
Now would also be a good time to think about what story you would like to tell about your itinerary in Story Maps.
For secondary literature to contextualize your story map:
For some historical background, see this short introduction.
For more information about Stark, see this chapter, this book, this book (about Stark's photography).
For more information about Lady Anne Blunt see this chapter, ch 9 of this book or this article.
For more information about Mabel Bent, see here or here.
For more information about St John Philby, see his obituary, this thesis, this book (with a chapter about Philby's photography) or this article.
If you would like to have "emergency temporary access" to books in HathiTrust you can follow the instructions in this video.