Edward W. Said, Palestinian writer and professor of literature at Columbia University, defined orientalism as a way to describe and emphasize the difference between the Eastern World and the West. “Orient” actually extends from North Africa to Asia, passing by the Middle East. Although a lot of people nowadays think that orientalism has vanished, the Western World hasn’t stopped pointing out the differences and emphasize the disparities between them and the Eastern world through many forms: paintings, songs, books, etc.
For this reason, and since we are living in Lebanon, an oriental country, we are here today studying and pointing out the different relations of Orientalism and mainly the different relations between orientalist authors. We would like to study how the Western world perceives us and understand how different authors, coming from different backgrounds, describe our Eastern world.
In order to reach this goal, our team met together through Zoom application and divided the work between the three of us.
We had started by gathering information from a master spreadsheet, prepared by Dr. Najla Jarkas and her students, that contains information on orientalist writers, their works and details that may or may not be relevant to our study. The information gathered was put in a separate, smaller spreadsheet that showed authors’ names, nationality, their category (i.e. whether the writer is an author, doctor, a journalist, a soldier, etc.), the title of their work, the category of the work (i.e. whether the work is a fiction, history, diary, etc.), the date of publishing, and the authors’ genders. Doing so allows us to see the different sections we can categorize.
Digging deeper in the spreadsheet, we realized that we can see some similarities in the data. For example, we saw that a big part of the writers came from the UK. We even realized that most of the writers were male. This led us to think about whether there are different relations between the orientalist authors and whether these relations had a deeper meaning.
In order to do so, the best tool to point out these relations is Palladio. Palladio is a DH tool, in which we insert the spreadsheet and it automatically creates relations between the categories by drawing graphs and networks and grouping common categories together.
After observing the similarities in the spreadsheet, we decided to dig deeper into specific relations by creating research questions on which our project will be structured. Below we summarized our research questions to date and draw attention to them, and they help us decide which aspects we will be focusing on when we analyze the data from the Orientalist Project Spreadsheet on Palladio
- Which gender were mainly orientalist authors?
- Which country do the majority of orientalist authors come from?
- Throughout which years were the majority of orientalist books published?
- What is the relation between the text categories and the publication dates?
The reason why we came up with these questions is because we realised that there were a lot of similarities regarding these matters within the spreadsheet.
Once we gathered all the information on the spreadsheet we noticed a few similarities and differences between a few of the entries.Therefore, due to these differences we thought of diving in and wanted to further analyze these differences that pertained to the author’s demographics like gender, origin, age etc..
After coming up with these research questions we decided to take a look on the networks that Palladio can provide based on our data in order to obtain preliminary answers.
Taking the authors’ genders as references, results show that based on the authors mentioned on Palladio, that there was a significant difference between the number of male authors and that of female authors. This indicates that these Orientalist books were published at times when gender discrimination was of a major social issue and women battled for their rights to attain gender equality in the 19th century, which is a compelling topic that should be further explored.
Next up, we studied the nationalities of the orientalist authors. The majority of the orientalist authors came from the United Kingdom. This implies that the UK is one of the regions that most considers literature and the concept of Orientalism to be of extraordinary importance. Based on the figures, the United States also joined the UK and had a relatively large number of Orientalist authors as well.
Moreover, answering our third question regarding the years of publications of the works, our results showcased that the timetable where the majority of orientalist books were published was mostly in the year 1885. Evidently, these books were most frequently published at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. This leaves the fact that a very small amount of books were published throughout the late 18th century.
Finally for the last question, we thought of grouping the text categories and the publication dates into centuries on to Palladio in order to analyze and find out the least to most frequent text categories written by orientalists authors over the years. When looking into the 18th century it is obvious that there were only a few Orientalist authors that published their works. During this century the Orientalist authors mainly wrote about travel and fiction. However this changed throughout the 19th century. During the 19th century the Orientalist authors work was mainly focused on ficturing and history. Moving into the 20th century that is similar to the previous century, the Orientalist authors mainly focused on fictional writings, although they still wrote about travel and history. In our current century, the 21st century, Orientalism is still partly relevant; although, we noticed a substantial drop in the work published during the 21st century. With the help in uploading the spreadsheet on Palladio, we were able to conclude that mainly only two works related to history were published in 2007 and in 2015. Therefore, not much orientalist work is being published at our time due to the evolution of the digital world and the more tech-savvy our generations are getting.
The conclusions we obtained are just observations about the data on our spreadsheet. These observations are a small introduction of what our DH project will consist of.
Moving forward with our project, each one of us will be conducting a deeper analysis on each of the questions and then reporting to the team to compare our answers. We will then create a network on Palladio that consists of all of our findings. This final network will then showcase the relation between the nationality of the authors, their gender, the date of publication of their work and the categories of their works all together. All of these findings will be present in our section of the DH project.
This blog couldn’t be done without the help of my team that consists of myself, Maha Younes and Karim Saridar.
Please feel free to give me any comment and feedback if you wish 🙂
References:
Joseph’s Blog 
2 thoughts on “Traveling Through Time with Orientalist Authors”