In a virtual library found in Minecraft -— a game where users can build virtual worlds out of blocks and create their own storylines — users can access the work of journalists who have been killed, jailed or exiled by governments, including articles by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The project, launched by Reporters Without Borders, design collective Blockworks, advertising agency DDB Germany and production company MediaMonks, gives users access to articles banned in five countries that rank poorly on the nongovernmental organization's World Press Freedom Index: Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.
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shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 20
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Minecraft hosts uncensored library full of banned texts - CNN - 0 views
www.cnn.com/...index.html
Egypt KSA Saudi Russia Vietnam Mexico censorship media RSF minecraft games internet
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Work in the library, launched Thursday to mark the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, is available in English and the original language in which the texts were written.
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"Young people grow up without being able to form their own opinions. By using Minecraft, the world's most popular computer game, as a medium, we give them access to independent information,"
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shared by Ed Webb on 30 Aug 15
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British Library rejects Taliban trove fearing terror laws - Yahoo News - 0 views
news.yahoo.com/ing-terror-laws-105317279.html
UK Britain terrorism censorship Taliban library idiocy
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"This is a symptom of a creeping orthodoxy of UK legislation that is trying to enforce so-called British values," said Fitzgerald, adding that the atmosphere has worsened since new guidelines were issued for universities calling on lecturers to look out for "potential radicals"."We're already seeing the effects. Some lecturers don't want to do modules on terrorism anymore because they don't want to come under suspicion."
U.S. Group Plans a Digital Library to Aid North African Research - International - The ... - 0 views
chronicle.com/...124118
maghreb Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Mauritania digital libraries information opensource
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shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jul 14
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Legal Deposit Regulations Raise Censorship Fears Among Publishers - Tunisia Live - 0 views
www.tunisia-live.net/...sorship-fears-among-publishers
Tunisia censorship media law regulation publishers
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On January 7, former prime minister Ali Laarayedh issued Decree 59-2014, which sets procedures for the legal deposit of periodical and non-periodical publications. Under Article 3 of the decree, printers, producers, editors and distributors are required to submit six copies of new publications to the Prime Ministry before making them available to the public. The decree states that the legal deposit aims at “enriching and consolidating the collection of the national library and the national center of documentation.”
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critics of decree 59 fear the stipulation to submit before publication could mean the return of prior censorship practices on books and newspapers
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Abdelssalem Zbidi, the prime ministry’s communications officer dismissed the censorship concerns, arguing that the new regulations only conform to the stipulations of Decree 115 of 2011 on freedom of press, printing and publishing. However, under decree 115, the legal deposit is only limited to non-periodical publications, while the new decree also targets periodicals. “This decree diverts a law which exists elsewhere (the deposit of copies of all publications in a country to the national library), to an instrument of political and ideological censorship”, Karim Ben Smail, an editor at Ceres Bookshop, argued
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How citizen video journalists in Egypt are 'pushing at traditional journalism' - Egypt ... - 1 views
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Members of the collective see themselves as performing an essential storytelling role: providing coverage of police brutality and filling a media "vacuum". "There isn't a free media," founder member Omar Hamilton told me during a visit to the collective's workspace in Cairo. "We have to step in where we can to provide alternative narratives, to provide what we would see as the truth that's not being presented."
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"There's nothing you can really do about it except run at the right time. Which is just after everyone else but not before it's too late,"
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we needed a space to work out of and to host a library of revolutionary material and to archive everything we can, including mobile phone footage and news-quality material
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The collective formed in the days following the January 2011 uprising when it set up a "human rights media tent" in Tahrir Square as "a point to collect footage that people had of police abuses".
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Asked whether they see themselves as activists or journalists, Hamilton explained how they have a "definite journalistic push". "We have a decentralised approach. We don't have an editorial policy, we don't have an editorial meeting at the beginning of the day to tell people where to go." Anyone can contribute footage, creating an "almost infinite number of camera people" who can be out filming, using mobile phones, DSLRs and hand-held video cameras.
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"We are both attacking state media and trying to push traditional media outlets into taking a stronger stance and backing them up in being able to show things that perhaps felt they were unable to show. "We are also empowering everyone that has a camera phone to make them feel like they can contribute to a wider narrative rather than just uploading it to YouTube."
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Mosireen is therefore reaching out to those without internet access, which is "one of the big, big, big challenges". "It's very easy to forget how hyper-connected we are compared to most of the world," Hamilton said
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The citizen journalists have licensed footage under creative commons on YouTube and Vimeo, where others can download the films. These can be used by broadcasters.
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It is not the international audience the activists are focused on. "We are in a fight that is going to be settled, or won or lost, here [in Egypt], so we don't need to spend too much time talking to or addressing international audiences. "It's really much more about Egyptian public opinion and the narrative within Egypt that is important, and helping people get access to the truth."
Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group: 2012-02-11: Losing My Revolution: A y... - 0 views
ws-dl.blogspot.com/...losing-my-revolution-year.html
Egypt #jan25 tahrir internet socialmedia memory forgetting
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The War on Terrorism: The Way Forward - 0 views
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Why is there still no international strategy to combat the so-called Islamic State? Gawdat Bahgat blames 1) conflicting regional and global interests; 2) continued uncertainty over Iran; 3) disagreements between civilian and military leaders, especially in the US, and 4) the absence of a political-ideological strategy to complement mere airstrikes.
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shared by Ed Webb on 13 Oct 09
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DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Yale University Library Gets Two Grants to Digi... - 0 views
digital-scholarship.org/...itize-middle-eastern-materials
digital humanities digitalization Yale Middle_east Syria Palestine nitle-musharaka nitle-arabic
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shared by Ed Webb on 23 Feb 19
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The battle over the memory of Egypt's revolution | openDemocracy - 0 views
www.opendemocracy.net/...r-memory-of-egypt-s-revolution
Egypt Bahrain memory history revolution #jan25 military authoritarianism
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The once-embattled ancien regime is back with full force. Not only to consolidate its power in the present, but also to control the past. Yet, since the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, besides the Islamists, two distinct communities were – and still are – in conflict, among other things, over the revolution’s nature and principles: the regime and the revolutionary activists. What follows is an exploration of these communities’ strategies to permeate the people’s collective consciousness and to enforce their own narratives of the revolution and its memory, across three different domains: Egypt’s public space; Egypt’s online sphere; and outside Egypt.
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in the revolution’s early years, Egypt’s public space was representative of the young activists’ creativity and rebellion
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Through graffiti on walls, images, texts and structures, the activists created from the country’s streets and squares memorials to keep the memory of the brave martyrs as well as the revolution’s ideals alive. Walls of Freedom, a 2014 book by Hamdy and Stone, offers thorough insights into the revolution and its artistic works. Young Egyptians’ independent cultural activities, including concerts and exhibitions, played a role in enhancing the historical narrative of the pro-revolution community.
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In November 2013, a few hours after Prime Minister Beblawi inaugurated it, protesters vandalised a memorial that the government built for ‘the martyrs of the revolution’. In his inaugurating speech, Beblawi referred to January 25 and June 30 ‘revolutions’ as well as the martyrs of the police and the army. That was interpreted by the protesters as another attempt to conflate the meanings and disrupt the image and the perceptions of the January 25 Revolution in the Egyptians’ collective consciousness
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the military, Egypt’s central power, endeavoured to restrict the public space and erase the memory of the January 25 revolution. For this power knows that while memories are linked to the past, they determine how many Egyptians will perceive the future. The military pursued 1984’s Orwellian prophecy: ‘he who controls the past controls the future’.
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the walls of revolutionary graffiti were repainted, CCTV cameras were installed in central spaces, and governmental offices were relocated away from the heart of Cairo
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in dismantling the revolutionary symbols, the regime intended to construct a collective memory that excludes rival interpretations of events to its own. That is reminiscent to the Bahraini government’s destruction of Pearl Roundabout, the rallying point of the 2011 mass anti-government protests.
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the activists’ 2012 campaign: Askar Kazeebon (Lying Military) whose modus operandi was to broadcast videos and documentaries to pedestrians that falsify the military’s accounts of various events and expose the soldiers’ crimes and human rights violations that official and regime-friendly media ignored
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The unprecedented crackdown on dissent and the draconian laws that reportedly imprisoned tens of thousands of activists had prompted many to surrender the public space. Some are silent out of fear or disappointment. Others tried to put the memory of the revolution aside, so that they can go on with their own personal lives
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Since the 2013 military coup, state and private media outlets – mostly controlled by the regime’s clientele – have kept glorifying the military’s role in recent years as well as defaming the revolution and activists as tools of the west to destroy Egypt
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tech-savvy young activists already utilised memorialisation to foment the democratic uprising. We Are All Khalid Said, a Facebook page created to commemorate the 28-year old Khalid Said who was brutally tortured and killed by police, in 2010, became the January 25 protests’ virtual rallying point and main coordinator.
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there are many initiatives to resist forgetting the revolution and silencing its voices. The most recent of which is Mosireen Collective’s 858 archive of resistance. In the Collective’s own words, the archive includes raw photographs, videos and documents that ‘present thousands of histories of revolt told from hundreds of perspectives. While the regime is using every resource to clamp down on public space and public memory the time has come to excavate and remember and re-present our histories.’
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Wiki-Thawra whose slogan is ‘so we don’t forget’; UCLA’s Tahrir Documents; AUC’s University on the Square; and MIT’s 18 Days in Egypt.
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After the 2013 military takeover, thousands involuntarily left the country to live in exile abroad. A minority among the exiled are still engaged in telling stories of the revolution and protesting al-Sisi government’s human rights violations and destruction of Egypt’s democratic hopes. Using art and satire, they continue to disturb the regime’s hegemonic revolution-defaming narratives.
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it is still uncertain whether the regime has successfully dominated the Egyptian collective memory of the January 25 Revolution. That is because collective memory is not a static realm but rather a fluid construct that shapes – and is shaped by – current conditions and future aspirations.
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shared by Ed Webb on 01 Jan 18
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Online Photo Archive in Amman Is Making Thousands of Images Public, Showing Pluralistic... - 0 views
muftah.org/c-histories-of-the-middle-east
Jordan research history culture heritage images photographs photos archive
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ACOR Photo Archive’s material is a unique collection due to the diversity of subjects it includes. It currently provides a representative record of Jordan’s archeological and social history spanning from 1955 to the early 2000s. Photos soon-to-be-digitized will feature subjects from the 1970s onwards in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran. Its historic photos of important sites are free to use and could be mobilized to support research proposals and grant applications.
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The ACOR’s archival images are valuable as records of change for both archaeological-cultural heritage sites (more than two-hundred are represented in Jordan alone), as well as daily life in the Middle East over the past seventy years. Indeed, this record of change means that the archive has the potential to impact future heritage preservation projects across the region. They allow visual comparison with the past, thereby illustrating recent damage and helping experts and local communities decide how sites should be managed in the future.
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NYU Abu Dhabi’s archive has an extensive collection of historic photos featured on its Instagram page (widening its popular appeal through more tongue-in-cheek posts). Darat al-Funun, an art gallery housed in Amman’s fashionable Jabal al-Webdeih district, also hosts an exhaustive online archive of video and images relating to the gallery’s exhibitions. It also features artist talks and musical performances over its almost thirty-year history. On a smaller scale, there are commendable efforts at documenting the modern visual heritage of the region, such as the Sultan-al-Qassemi-managed Instagram dedicated to highlighting the architectural heritage of the Emirate of Sharjah in the UAE. (You can check out ACOR’s instagram here.)
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the imperative to document and preserve the heritage of the Middle East, as it goes through another decade of dramatic aesthetic and political change. The stakes involved in these transformations are highlighted by the saddening example of Khaled Assad, director of antiquities at Palmyra Museum in Syria. Assad went to his grave in 2015 protecting the location of priceless artifacts under his care from ISIS
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The ACOR Photo Archive also depicts the very forces threatening cultural heritage in the region. For example, it includes photographs of the archaeological digs of 1982 and 1983, in which the Ayn Ghazal statues – among the earliest large-scale depictions of human forms in the world (from the mid-7th millennia) – were unearthed in Jordan. As the photographs illustrate, the excavation site lay mere feet from the highway, highlighting the threats to physical cultural heritage posed by routine urbanization. Archeologist Gary Rollefson, a key member of the team that discovered the Ayn Ghazal statues, has participated in the digitization project, providing extensive background information on the digs catalogued in the archive.
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By encouraging people to see their old family photographs as intimately connected to the public history of Jordan, Palestine, and the rest of the region, the archive aims to encourage citizens to take steps to preserve and digitize their own personal collections.
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shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 19
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Translation project offers Israelis look into Palestinian literature - 0 views
www.al-monitor.com/...-translation-poems-novels.html
Israel Palestine israelpalestine literature language Arabic Hebrew stories translation culture politics
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Only 0.4% of Israeli Jews under the age of 70 can read the stories in the original Arabic language, he says. He also points to the fact that according to Israel’s National Library, less than 1% of all literature translated into Hebrew was written in Arabic, and 90% of the translators were Jews
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The stories of “Amputated Tongue," which all deal in various ways with language deprivation, is written by 57 Palestinian writers from Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and abroad. The impressive compilation of contemporary Palestinian prose was translated into Hebrew according to a unique model by 36 translators, where one Arab and one Jewish translator collaborated. One-third of them were Palestinians. The short stories by some of the best Palestinian writers provide Israeli readers with more than a glimpse of entire lives lived in this land, and of this land.
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The project lasted three years. Its goal was to give a voice to Palestinian Arabic society in the hostile climate created by Israel’s right-wing regime that views Arabic as an enemy language — as made abundantly clear in the 2018 Nationality Law, which downgraded the status of Arabic as an official language. The anthology targeted those few Israelis who want to know more about Palestinians but have had little exposure to them until now.
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The first story in the compilation is by Gaza resident Sama Hassan, titled “No." It tells the story of a woman whose husband repeatedly rapes her, sometimes until she is bleeding, but she cannot utter the word “No." “… Over and over he cut into her flesh, which grew increasingly tough until she emitted a groan of pain. … You are nothing but the family’s property, was the first grating thought. Hands and womb, hands and womb." I told Burbara that the story had shocked me. I put the book aside and could not continue reading for a few days. “We put ‘No’ first on purpose,” she explained. “We wanted readers to feel and tell themselves, ‘Wow, what is she telling us? How will we learn more about the women in Gaza who are not heard.’”
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Given the nationalistic climate in Israel, with a prime minister who incites hatred of Arabs, I asked Burbara how many Jewish Israelis she thought would read the book. “That is the million-dollar question,” she answered. “But I believe that if you start to drip water on a stone, it digs into its surface and leaves a mark. 'Amputated Tongue' is the first rain that will drip onto the Israeli stone and dig into it deeper and deeper.”
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Teaching Arabic to kids: How families are putting the fun back into reading | Middle Ea... - 0 views
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There is no quicker way to suck all the fun out of reading than simultaneously translating each story page from formal Arabic into colloquial Arabic.
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Shendy translated some of her children’s favourite stories into colloquial Egyptian, painstakingly preserving the rhythm and rhyme. She then printed out her translations and glued them over the English in the book.
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Marcia Lynx Qualey, a translator of Arabic children’s literature and co-founder of the World Kid Lit project, says that children's publishers are in a difficult position
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“They may want to publish books in a’amiya, but they also want to sell into as large a market as possible. This means being able to sell across borders, particularly into wealthier Gulf countries, but it also means selling to schools and libraries. Generally, it's only the books entirely in Fusha that are seen as ‘properly’ educational.”
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"I had to read the story in Fusha in my head, each page, and then translate it into colloquial Arabic so that she understood the spoken Arabic words. It really bothered me. It didn't feel natural. It cut the flow for me and for her.”
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The couple set up a publishing house they named Ossass Stories (Ossass means "stories" in Levantine dialect), learning the trade from scratch and financing it themselves. Makhoul would work by day as a journalist and then research the publishing industry by night, drawing up cost analyses and searching for illustrators and distribution outlets.
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The problem with reading material for very young children learning Arabic is universal. But the lack of age-appropriate learning resources is felt more keenly by parents raising their children outside the region.
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“If it's nursery rhymes and cartoons, and things like that, they’re all dubbed into Standard Arabic, it's very frustrating.”
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“The problem is Standard Arabic isn't spoken anywhere.” Khalil says. “It's an ideological or theoretical standard. And so that's where linguistically the problems occur and pedagogically, as well. You're kind of creating artificial material and scenarios.”
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I'm not saying we should do a'amiya [spoken Arabic] forever for everyone. I'm just saying for the little ones
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shared by Ed Webb on 11 Aug 23
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AI Causes Real Harm. Let's Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype - Scientific Ame... - 0 views
www.scientificamerican.com/...ot-imaginary-existential-risks
opinion analysis AI class race computing propaganda science
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Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.
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Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.
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Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”
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Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.
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output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem
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the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few
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Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.
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the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place
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the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.
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employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.
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too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity
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We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.
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shared by Ed Webb on 27 Oct 23
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Ukraine, Hamas wars provide unprecedented boom in violent video - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...israel-war-violent-videos
Israel politics media analysis socialmedia video propaganda Gaza war conflict Ukraine
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The wars in Israel and Ukraine have fueled an explosion in videos online showcasing the horrors of modern war, bringing killings and cruelty to a global audience of viewers who are unprepared — or all too willing — to watch.
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fighters use cellphones and GoPro cameras to record or live-stream footage from a point-blank perspective, either for purposes of military strategy or propaganda
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Basem Naim, the leader of Hamas’s international relations arm, told The Washington Post in an interview that the footage was shared on social media both to gain global attention and to embolden Hamas militants for the war ahead.“Who is terrorizing whom? We are the victims … of this huge killing machine,” he said. The videos “show that we can do something. It is not only we who are beaten all the time. No, sometimes we can also hit back.”
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Psychiatrists have warned that the repeated viewing of such visceral imagery can lead to what’s known as “vicarious trauma,” damaging people’s mental health
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Some commenters there say the videos offer a grisly lesson. They have “basically taken all the ‘glory’ out of war,” one Redditor said in a thread discussing a video of an injured Russian soldier taking his own life. “I wish politicians would watch these vids as they had their morning coffee.”Others there celebrate the violence or riff on the strange banality of seeing such carnage from home. “I’m eating coco puffs watching this,” one Redditor said on a video showing Russians soldiers killed with grenades.
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The Ukrainian government last year began posting photos and videos of captured and killed Russian soldiers to Telegram, Twitter and YouTube in hopes of inflaming Russian protests over the war’s human costs. Military-justice experts told The Post that some of the images likely violated the Geneva Conventions, which demand governments shield prisoners of war from “insults and public curiosity.”
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White supremacists have for years spread videos showing violent acts committed by people of color to inflame racial animus in hopes of winning potential recruits, Henry said. In recent conflicts, such gruesome videos have been used to dehumanize the enemy and get international viewers feeling more invested in the fight
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“When any of the various Ukraine war influencers share videos of Russian soldiers dying from drone attacks, part of the strategy is to appeal to American or European audiences who see Russian soldiers as part of a wider hated out-group and Ukrainian soldiers as sort of like themselves.”
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such videos have also been used to sow terror and provoke an emotional overreaction that could enrage onlookers, expand a conflict or play into the attackers’ hands, said Amanda E. Rogers, a research fellow at the Century Foundation think tank who has studied extremist propaganda. Nearly a decade ago, she said, the Islamic State’s video-recorded beheadings of aid workers, journalists and others helped mark a turning point for terrorists who saw the value in publishing footage so heinous many viewers felt they couldn’t ignore it.
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Israel’s Foreign Ministry has adopted a similar tactic to enrage Western audiences by running hundreds of haunting YouTube ads, including videos in which Israeli medical examiners describe what they saw in their autopsies of the bodies of children purportedly killed during the Hamas attack, according to YouTube’s ad library.