News Nine: Bhasha Centre’s new digital library aims to engage with theatre community, further collaborations between playwrights. “The Drama Library is a free-for-all, open-access digital library of ‘unpublished’ Indian plays from English to Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Arabic, Sindhi and Dakhni Arabic.”
Bahrain News Agency: Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre launches Digital Arabic Lexicon Website . “The website features the most common Arabic expressions as per digital Arabic blogs, boasting an innovative design including advanced features and illustrations that go with each term, audio features to learn correct pronunciations, and other options to clarify ideas and provide detailed explanations for non-Arabic speakers.”
New-to-me, from The Conversation: Timbuktu manuscripts placed online are only a sliver of West Africa’s ancient archive. “While Mali Magic displays 45 very photogenic manuscripts from one private library, the site doesn’t begin to tell the full story of the wealth of West Africa’s manuscripts that are found from the Atlantic to Lake Chad. But thanks to decades of scholarship and, recently, digitisation, that information is now accessible at a bilingual, open-access, online union catalogue of nearly 80,000 manuscripts at the West African Arabic Manuscript Database. This is a resource I began 30 years ago at the University of Illinois that now provides students access to most of the titles and authors that make up West Africa’s manuscript culture.”
Zawya: Ibtikar enables open access to digital library during UAE Month of Reading (PRESS RELEASE). “Ibtikar, a UAE-based Educational Technology company, in cooperation with United Educational Publishing (UEP), a UAE-based Educational Press, has announced that 1,000+ Arabic stories on their reading platform, Al Diwan powered by Akadimi, is now available for access without log-in during the UAE Month of Reading this month.” I’m sorry this is so late in the month but the announcement is dated March 23. You don’t have to register to use the library, just click on a book and start reading.
NYU Abu Dhabi: Online Platform Provides Open-source Resources to Learn Arabic. “The new website, titled MAWARIDARABIYYA, is a plethora of materials and links aimed at empowering a learner to easily find specific lessons, courses, and online resources to meet their needs. Some of these materials include educational technology tools, popular books in the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language, names of organizations and conferences, scholarships and programs, language centers and programs, as well as Youtube channels that focus on teaching Arabic and shedding light on Arab culture.”
The Hindu: Digital archive of school books launched. “Azim Premji University on Monday launched an open access digital archive of over 5,600 school books and related material from India and other countries in South Asia. The Schoolbooks Archive, as the platform is called, has material in multiple languages including Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Arabic, and other languages apart from English that span a period of more than 200 years.” Fourteen languages are represented here, but English has the most materials.
Arab News: New partnership aims to push boundaries of science for young Arabic speakers. “King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia teamed up with a leading academic publisher for the recent launch of the Arabic version of Frontiers for Young Minds, an open-access educational resource through which young Arabs worldwide can access a library of child-friendly scientific articles in their own language.”
Getty: Online Exhibition Explores Palmyra in English and Arabic. “For centuries the ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra have captured the imagination–testaments to the legacy of the prosperous multicultural center of trade that once dominated the region. Return to Palmyra, a new website presented in English and Arabic, invites audiences to explore the rich history of the city, including an exhibition of rare 18th-century etchings and 19th-century photographs of the site, new scholarship, and a moving interview with Waleed Khaled al-As’ad about the modern-day experience of living and working among the ruins of this storied locale.”
New York University Abu Dhabi: Researchers Develop Large-scale Readability Leveled Thesaurus in Arabic. “Researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have developed an Online Readability Leveled Arabic Thesaurus. The work was conducted by Associate Professor of Practice of Arabic Language Muhamed Al Khalil in collaboration with Professor of Computer Science Nizar Habash, who also leads the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab. The one-of-a-kind interface provides the possible roots, English glosses, related Arabic words and phrases, and readability on a five-level readability scale for a user-inputted Arabic word.”
MENAFN: UAE- Emirates Literature Foundation partners with Google to put global focus on Arab authors. “The Emirates Literature Foundation, together with Google, has launched ‘Kateb Maktub’, an initiative that will vastly increase the presence and visibility of Arab authors online, ahead of World Arabic Language Day. The initiative is designed to boost the number of Arab author pages on Wikipedia, one of the world’s most visited websites with more than 1 billion visitors per month.”
Gulf Today: Sharjah spearheads huge project to chronicle 17 centuries of Arabic. “Heralding a new era for the Arabic language lexicon, Sharjah has embarked on a landmark project to chronicle 17 centuries of development in the Arabic language spanning five distinct time periods. The Historical Corpus of the Arabic Language is a monumental undertaking that will offer unparalleled insight into the world’s fifth most widely spoken language and serve as a linguistic resource for researchers, academia, linguists and students worldwide.” Sharjah is a city in the United Arab Emirates.
PR Newswire: Clarivate Launches the Arabic Citation Index in Egypt (PRESS RELEASE). “Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CCC), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, has now launched the Arabic Citation Index™ (ARCI), the world’s first local language citation index for the Arabic world in Egypt. The ARCI is funded by the Egyptian government, and is available across the entire research community in Egypt. It is also open to journal submissions by editors of Arabic-language journals and will be open to researchers and organisations in all 22 nations of the Arab League by the end of 2020.”
Ahram Online: Egypt’s National Library and Archives put periodicals online for free. “Egypt’s National Library and Archives has announced that it will make all of its scientific periodicals available online for free. The National Library and Archives said that the move comes to allow a larger segment of readers and researchers to access the periodicals, some of which are almost two decades old.” I tried this. Everything I saw was in Arabic, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of geo-restrictions.
Synced: AraNet: New Deep Learning Toolkit for Arabic Social Media. “The performance of natural language processing (NLP) systems has dramatically improved on tasks such as reading comprehension and natural language inference, and with these advances have come many new application scenarios for the tech. Unsurprisingly, English is where most NLP R&D has been focused. Now, a team of researchers from the Natural Language Processing Lab at the University of British Columbia in Canada have proposed AraNet, a deep learning toolkit designed for Arabic social media processing.”
Google Blog: Making our products more helpful in Arabic. “Today, we’re announcing new products in the Middle East and North Africa, a region connected by a common language, Arabic. The Arabic language, beautiful yet complex, is written from right-to-left, has a range of dialects, and one word can mean many different things depending on the context. For our products to be helpful, they need to understand the nuances of the language.
