There is little granular data for an urban history of Abu Dhabi for the growth years of the end of the twentieth century. Sources are dispersed and have not yet been mass digitized so that their data can be analyzed with contemporary digital historical methods. Our project builds on examples of in spatial humanities demonstrating how city directories are rich sources for urban history (Sutton, NYPL, Milliken) and focuses on an analysis of the diverse populations in the capital city of the UAE. Through studying the “phone book”--itself a highly globalized object with its share of documentary shortcomings--we study temporal and locational patterns of markers of both national belonging and religious identification in some 400K telephone subscriptions across three decades. The results presented in this paper stem from a recent project to digitize a phone book collection, as well as dataset under construction, allowing a data-centered comparison with qualitative scholarship on transience, urban planning and placemaking in the Gulf (Alshestawy, Alamira, Molotch & Ponzini). The difference of digital history, this paper argues, lies in the types of new sources that are being used in Gulf Studies, the scale at which data are collected and analyzed as never before, as well concomitant forms of critical awareness required to carry out such research ethically and effectively.