Abou-Naddara Newspaper Collection

Overview

This collection offers the complete newspaper series published by the Egyptian nationalist James Sanua (1839-1912) from 1878 to 1910. In addition, previously unpublished manuscripts, articles from newspapers of the period of the journalist and his oeuvre, as well as the decorations he received are also available. Most of the material was directly scanned from the originals published at the end of the 19th century and contains magnificent lithographs.

Access to James Sanua’s newspaper publications has hitherto been difficult. The journalistic and artistic material of the Paris-exiled egyptian nationalist has therefore hardly received the degree of scholarly attention it actually deserves. During research for her Ph.D. dissertation “The Construction of a National Self through the Definition of its Enemy in James Sanua’s Early Satirical Writings” Eliane Ettmueller was able to collect James Sanua’s complete works and – even more importantly – the majority of the originals of his newspapers. Mrs Eva Milhaud kindly gave her permission to have Sanua’s legacy digitized and to make it available to the international community.

The project was financed by the Heidelberg University Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” and realized in collaboration between the project “Gauging Cultural Asymmetries: Asian Satire and the Search for Identity in the Era of Colonialism and Imperialism” and the Visual Resources Team of the Cluster’s Heidelberg Research Architecture - HRA. In January 2017 Heidelberg's Centre for Transcultural Studies contracted Data Futures to migrate the Abou-Naddara research project from VRA managed by Tamboti (HRA's standards-based digital collection management system) to freizo - preserving the VRA metadata and integrating the freizo collection with a Mirador-based research workflow and public internet presentation. The collection currently contains 427 newspapers and is nearing completion for transition of the service for support of researchers from Tamboti to freizo. Research using the new collection has already begun to produce comprehensive annotation of the Abou-Naddara newspapers using OADM.

Access

Until June 2017 the full project will remain accessible only to the research community. However, a IIIF and Mirador-2.2.2 presentation of a pamphlet is available: Le Journal d'Abou Naddara, 1904, Issue 3. It allows browsing of the pages using the thumbnails at the bottom (the 'three dots' icon toggles the thumbnail display) and viewing minute detail is possible using the mouse or trackpad with deep zoom. Click the 'i' button at the top right to see metadata about the newspaper, and click the 'bubble' button at the top left to see current work on annotation.