Archives in Times of Change: Challenges and Opportunities Oral narratives and testimonies constitute powerful modes of activism in the struggle over the collective memory of a particular group or country. They complement/contest official narratives and, potentially, construct counter-narratives of dominant mainstream histories. However the process making these memories available to a wider audience in a structured, accessible and sustainable format i.e. the creation of an archive to house and preserve these narratives, is not straightforward nor is it innocent. Archives have been described as “tools of the powerful” that seek to normalize, standardize and impose order. Archives are necessarily entangled in the construction of hegemonic narratives as well as counter-hegemonic narratives that potentially shape the future of a given group or country. They are inevitably sites of contestation and revisioning. The Women and Memory Archive of women’s narratives in times of change is no exception in the history of struggles over memory. It is a continuation of the Oral History Archive initiated by WMF in the 1990s to document the oral narratives of Egyptian women who played a role in public life with the aim of foregrounding women’s voices and combating their marginalization in mainstream history. It is deliberately conceived as an intervention in the narrative of and about the revolution. It positions itself within a “politics of hope” in lieu of a “politics of despair”. It celebrates women’s agency within a larger narrative of citizen engagement and empowerment. It tells a story of possibilities and potential for change. It counters narratives of apathetic and disenfranchised populations. It captures the complex interactions/shifting positions between surrender and perseverance, love and hate, belief and disillusionment. Having said that, the project team engages in constant revisions and rethinking of aims and processes as the work develops. Our intervention in the roundtable on Digitizing Women’s and Gender History will address issues of representation and the ethics of managing women’s narratives.

Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran: Fabricating An Archive The initial inspiration for the project came from an intellectual frustration and a technological possibility. Histories of Qajar Iran have focused on political history. Social and cultural history in general, and histories inclusive of women and gender analysis more particularly, remain all but nonexistent. The main reason historians of Qajar Iran have offered was that sources for doing Qajar history differently did not exist. Yet closer scrutiny indicates that the paucity of sources is not a question of absence, but rather of inaccessibility. For instance, prior to the late 1920s, when laws requiring the registration of births and other life events and the recording of commercial transactions, were enacted, families recorded such information on the first pages of the family Qur’an or other cherished books and objects. In other words, these documents exist, but not in state or national archives, nor in any recognized private library. Fabricating an archive envisioned differently – based on family holdings, though inclusive of relevant institutional repositories – collected through a process of digitization, preparation for online preservation, and usable through smart searches, has posed numerous conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic challenges for scholars and researchers involved in this project: What counts as a document? How does our team, in Iran and abroad, decide what to include and what to exclude from a family (or institutional) collection? How does our categorization of a document -- through defining its genres, subjects, peoples, and places – make it searchable and unsearchable for users? How does the digital imaging of a document impact its use by researchers? How do our selections impact the shape of future research? In the process, our team of collaborators have come to think and re-think what constitutes an archive, how things ought to be archived, our own intervention on archiveable things, and how we render things searchable, thus aiding, as well as making it difficult, the pursuance of some ideas but not others. We have also come to think differently about our “audience”: different needs of the archive’s users have come to influence its life. We promote it on Facebook and Twitter. We receive comments that show us how people may have different perspectives on our archive and how all these different needs affect the shaping of the archive.

Gendering Diasporic Digital Histories How do the digital humanities shape our historical questions? Digitizing and analyzing large sets of data--from images to census records--are fairly new within the field of Middle Eastern history, and we are still grappling with the technical and financial challenges such large projects pose. At its core, and beyond preserving information and facilitating access to it by researchers, this new approach begs the question of whether it is worth the effort. My contribution to the roundtable would be to discuss some of the projects that the Khayrallah Center is undertaking, and to explore how these digital humanities approaches are helping us pose new questions, and come up with new answers. In particular, I will address how our use of the US Census data has allowed us to rewrite the gendered narrative of early Arab migration to the US.

I am co-presenting on “Digitizing Women's and Gender History” and this presentation explores the podcast as a unique technology and genre for researching and presenting women's history in digital form. Through our work as editors and hosts of the series on Women, Gender and Sex at the Ottoman History Podcast, we've seen that a series of podcasts on the history of women and gender in the Middle East can serve many different ends. First, podcasts are a way to foster interdisciplinary and transnational conversations between scholars who would otherwise find it difficult to be in the same room at the same time. Scholarly work in the Middle East is often time-consuming, expensive, and logistically complex. By relying on a team of hosts who can reach scholars located all around the US and Europe as well as in many parts of the region itself, the podcast stages conversations among researchers and scholars located around the world. The podcast can also serve as a way to publicize, digitize, and discuss sources for Middle East women's history. We propose a section based on "sources" as a regular part of our podcasts, in which we ask scholars to discuss a primary source relevant to their research and the subject of the podcast, which will be made available online. Additionally, the podcast could also serve as the basis for a network for scholars working on women and gender history in the Middle East. We propose a database that links researchers to the digital sources they could help others to access. For example, many of us have pdfs or images collected from our research which we cannot make available online, but could share on an individual basis for research or teaching. Finally, we envision the Ottoman History Podcast and our series on Women, Gender and Sex as a new way of presenting not only the history of women and gender in the Middle East but also the processes of history-making to our students. What roles could digital genres like the podcast play in teaching and pedagogy? How might we design podcasts for use in the classroom, with accompanying primary sources and historiographical discussions? Might podcasts be a way to introduce students to scholars and research in a more personal and engaging way than the traditional monograph? How might students develop their own podcasts to display their engagement with information and concepts presented in the classroom?

Podcasting Middle Eastern Women’s History at the Ottoman History Podcast: This presentation explores the podcast as a unique technology and genre for researching and presenting women's history in digital form. Through our work as editors and hosts of the series on Women, Gender and Sex at the Ottoman History Podcast, we've seen that a series of podcasts on the history of women and gender in the Middle East can serve many different ends. First, podcasts are a way to foster interdisciplinary and transnational conversations between scholars who would otherwise find it difficult to be in the same room at the same time. Scholarly work in the Middle East is often time-consuming, expensive, and logistically complex. By relying on a team of hosts who can reach scholars located all around the US and Europe as well as in many parts of the region itself, the podcast stages conversations among researchers and scholars located around the world. The podcast can also serve as a way to publicize, digitize, and discuss sources for Middle East women's history. We propose a section based on "sources" as a regular part of our podcasts, in which we ask scholars to discuss a primary source relevant to their research and the subject of the podcast, which will be made available online. Additionally, the podcast could also serve as the basis for a network for scholars working on women and gender history in the Middle East. We propose a database that links researchers to the digital sources they could help others to access. For example, many of us have pdfs or images collected from our research which we cannot make available online, but could share on an individual basis for research or teaching. Finally, we envision the Ottoman History Podcast and our series on Women, Gender and Sex as a new way of presenting not only the history of women and gender in the Middle East but also the processes of history-making to our students. What roles could digital genres like the podcast play in teaching and pedagogy? How might we design podcasts for use in the classroom, with accompanying primary sources and historiographical discussions? Might podcasts be a way to introduce students to scholars and research in a more personal and engaging way than the traditional monograph? How might students develop their own podcasts to display their engagement with information and concepts presented in the classroom?