In the context of recent events in the global Middle East, many people have struggled to make sense of the role of technology (especially social media) in the fomentation of a revolutionary praxis. One of the problems of studying technology and revolution is that common interpretation of new media—as spreadable, quantifiably predictable, and without a body—lends itself to ahistorical insights. How might a digital humanities approach to scholarship offer insights into the dynamic of revolution in a digital age where nothing is going to give itself over—whether technocratic or militaristic. It is neither the Egyptian culture nor the technology, but the people who resist. This paper provides an extended analysis of the relationship between technology and revolutionary practices. The technological infrastructure examined includes: the Internet, microblogging, Twitter, Facebook, smart phones, the convention of the # tag, phone numbers stored in digitized contact lists, personal mobile communication devices, and communication habits. But it could not be simply a matter of technology that caused a revolution. It was also a matter of body-based habits that had already propagated throughout contemporary Egyptian culture: habits of phone use, habits of communication and other body-based elements. And I would add that this discourse has emerged from a contemporary history of the “idea of revolution” in Egyptian culture from ‘Urabi against the Ottomans in 1882, to Zaghloul against the British in 1919, to Nasser against the monarchy in 1952, to the bread riots of 1977, to the leaderless revolution of 2011. I will argue that it was actually a convergence of 1) a technology infrastructure 2) body-habits, 3) national narrative of revolution that enabled the mobilization of the body politic that was identified by global witnesses as the “Arab spring” and the moment of revolution in the global Middle East. This talk presents the theoretical motivations behind creating a knowledge management system for Arabic—a body of work that coheres dissimilar elements not into a single idea, but into a heterogeneous network made apprehendable and readable. Its design demonstrates the praxis of multi-modal cultural analysis. In doing so, the system collects dissimilar media elements into a heterogeneous network of relations. The aim is not to collapse into a single vector of analysis or single explanatory story, but rather to map interesting patterns that play out across media forms. It is designed to refute the possibility of a monolithic narrative about contemporary Egypt.

This paper describes the design and making of an interactive (Google) map of incidents and other information pertaining to warfare during the “Summer War” of 2006 in Lebanon. It covers the background to the war, reasons for making the map, which sources were used and how it was made. Furthermore, it explains how the map came to be used in the relief effort in the country and how it might have contributed to the understanding of the war itself. The map was constructed in the KML markup language using no other programming tools than the normal user interface to Google Earth. The paper discusses the challenges of creating a large and complex mapping of located incidents over time, the limitations of the KML language, access to news sources, accuracy of location, and transformation of the data into other formats. Publication techniques and practical usage of the map is also covered both as it applied at the time and for later research. Problems arising from the difference between other, static maps of the 2006 war, and this, transient and adaptable mapping format are addressed.