Over 400 million people speak Arabic worldwide as their native or non-native language. Yet it remains underrepresented in the knowledge available on the internet and its digitalized archives. The problem is at the core of the projects developed by Majd Al-Shihabi, a Palestinian-Syrian-Canadian technologist, urban planner, and free culture advocate. He has worked on initiatives like the Palestine Open Maps, as part of Visualizing Palestine, and MASRAD, a platform for archiving oral history.
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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 from us.
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As he explains, matters of power and institutional barriers dictate what is present and what is accessible in Arabic. Even though massive archival materials exist, their search engines and terms aren’t designed to suit the language and its speakers.
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This is an episode from Whose Voices? a podcast series from Whose Knowledge? It was first published on March 13, 2023.