Catch me if you can! Tracing the late Ottoman ideosphere through network analysis and stylometry of the Arabic periodical press
Creators: name: Grallert, Till
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: Digital Humanities
Periodical Studies
Middle East Studies
Network Analysis
Stylometry
Arabic Periodicals
Ottoman Empire

description: Digital corpora and computational approaches are indispensable for scrutinising the periodical press as an ideosphere. I argue that one has to transcend the individual periodical and engage in a systematic study of the periodical press at scale in order to better understand both the intellectual history of the Eastern Mediterranean and periodical production itself. The case study of a corpus of four late Ottoman Arabic-speaking periodicals from the Eastern Mediterranean and comprising <em>al-Muqtabas</em>, <em>al-Ḥaqaʾiq</em>, <em>Lughat al-ʿArab</em> and <em>al-Ḥasnāʾ</em> introduces and evaluates some of the mitigation strategies. After introducing my own efforts of building an open and scholarly digital corpus with OpenArabicPE, I engage in computational exploration through network analysis, mapping, and stylometry along the guiding question of what were the core nodes (authors and periodicals) in the ideoscape of the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean? Modelling the network of references to periodical titles, I can confirm established knowledge about the importance of certain journals over others. The Cairene journals of <em>al-Manār</em>, <em>al-Muqtaṭaf</em> and <em>al-Hilāl</em> are central to the late Ottoman Arabic ideosphere, even though they were published outside the Ottoman Empire. A future systematic exploration of periodicals will have to digitise these and compare them to <em>al-Muqtabas</em>, which shows many traits of a periodical of transregional importance very different from the other journals in our corpus. The exploration of the network of article authors, on the other hand, provides a number of surprising results that will need to be addressed in future scholarship: The noted importance of Iraqi writers over Syrians among the core nodes of the network contradicts the common narrative about the Arabic renaissance (<em>nahḍa</em>). A similar importance of Baghdad over the more commonly assumed centres of Arab intellectual production is found in the geographic distribution of toponyms in bylines for <em>al-Muqtabas</em>. One would, again, need to test other transregional periodicals to see whether they provide a similar Iraqi connection or if <em>al-Muqtabas</em> is an outlier in this regard. The network analysis of authors also demonstrates lacunae in the historiography of the Arabic press and the intellectual history of the late Ottoman Arab ideosphere, namely the absence of the core nodes in our network from major works of scholarship. Noting that any analysis of authorship and socio-intellectual networks is limited by the fact that less than one fifths of all articles carry identifiable authorship information, I finally submit our corpus to stylometric analysis. This provides significant hints towards authors of the small number of anonymous articles longer than 5000 words. Testing the hypothesis that a journal’s editors were the actual authors of anonymous texts, the results are inconclusive. The analysis of articles of more than 5000 words in <em>al-Muqtabas</em> returned one cluster of texts by an anonymous author very different from those articles that can indeed by attributed to the editor.