Middle East Studies On-Line
Jon W. Anderson, MESA Bulletin

MATERIALS of Middle East studies and not just for Middle East studies are increasingly appearing on-line. The ’Net (Internet) that brought file archives, newsgroups and mailing lists devoted to regional issues and material is rapidly becoming a publishing medium in the Web (World Wide Web) with more and more of the output of Middle East studies themselves. The Bulletin now has a site, or “homepage,” on the World Wide Web at http://www.cua.edu/www/ mesabul with select articles from recent issues and connections to material on the MESA Bulletin Gopher.

The World Wide Web has been the breakthrough technology for making the Internet user-friendly and mainstream. WWW hides the “computery” aspects of the Internet behind snappy graphics and an easy-to-use interface that together have fostered much recent press and commercial enthusiasm over “the Net,” such as:

It’s similar to what the library was 100 years ago, or the telegraph. It will be bigger and better than television. We’re not talking about a 500-channel medium. We’re talking about 250,000 channels that speak across all borders It represents who we are, how we act, transact business and engage in relationships. The Internet is about information empowerment. I think it will change world culture. (Michael Wolff in Investor’s Business Daily 21 Sep 95, p. A8)

This summer, the number of commercial Internet sites passed those of educational institutions. The Internet, in a sense, has graduated.

For moving beyond the academy, the Web’s most compelling “new” features are hypertext and multimedia. Like most new technologies, these are compounds of existing ones in which existing content migrates to new forms. Much as Gopher extended earlier, and underlying, technologies of file archives (Archie) and remote file transfer (FTP) by linking files to menus of pointers in directories or catalogs, the WWW goes a step further than Gopher by embedding links in documents themselves as highlighted words or images that lead to another part of a document, to another document, image or program (e.g., to send e-mail, run a video, play a recording). The result is a “hypertext” with many links rather like a “live” cross-index or, in the visions of enthusiasts, a multi-stranded, “web” of endlessly linked documents. The second extension is to add pictures, diagrams, maps and recordings to text in what is called “multimedia.”

These features give the Internet the capabilities of mainstream publishing, not least to reach a wider audience. For a journal of a learned society such as the MESA Bulletin, which cannot be bought on a newsstand, these capabilities extend it beyond print and beyond the Association’s membership. The Bulletin has already moved to a form of extended publication. Some parts are printed and distributed to members (and subscribing institutions). Others are “on-line,” freely available for browsing and computer-searchable, such as the listing of recent conferences; others are both in print and on-line, such as listings of the contents of edited works and collections in Middle East studies or recent books, which are listed in the MESA Newletter. While the reviews are currently available only to members and subscribers who receive the printed Bulletin, these notes on research and teaching resources, the tables of contents and the inside covers (with MESA’s mission statement, membership information, officers and the Bulletin’s editors and address) are also on-line. These extensions reach complementary audiences: the print version with reviews reaches a core professional audience of members, while the online versions serve as a form of outreach as more and more people come “on-line.”

Hypertext, the cross-linking of on-line documents, ultimately blurs even these distinctions. WWW homepages, Gopher sites and email addresses mentioned in this note, for instance, are “live” in its on-line version, so a reader can try them immediately. Reviews and articles could be linked to others on similar topics or countries, or to other works by the same author or to reference material, maps, pictures and sounds. References and bibliographies could be linked directly to the actual sources for on-the-spot checking. Maps and other reference material are already available on-line (e.g., MENIC or ABZU, below); on-line syllabi and documents foreshadow packets of material for courses, seminars or self-paced learning modules as people like us make our material newly available. Visionaries imagine a vast, growing web of interlinked information, but what is really new is a shorter distance or enhanced access to the apparatus of scholarship (book reviews, study guides, reference material). While visionaries imagine this puts research capabilities at everyone’s hand, the more mundane, and more interesting, comparison would be to how printing made texts and thus the skills of reading them more widely available. Similarly, the various steps toward a hypertext web make additional apparatus of scholarship, such as annotation and reference, more widely accessible. That, at least, is a main reason for the Bulletin’s on-line extensions.

Internet publication also inverts the traditional economics of publishing. On the one hand, the capital costs of production and thus the barriers to entry are dramatically reduced, which is leading to an explosion of Web publishing. On the other hand, while publishing on the Internet does not require a distinctive “literacy” on the receiving end (as the earlier technologies did), it depends on access to nearly as much technology to receive as to produce on-line publications. The conundrum of declining barriers to entry but rising requirements for access may disappear in time, but the technological requirements of the WWW currently enhance have/have-not gaps; so the Bulletin’s Gopher service will continue to carry tables of contents, lists of new books and conferences, the index to the contents of edited works and collections and professional service information. Gopher material is accessible from the Bulletin’s WWW “homepage,” while material on the WWW is only accessible to “web-browsers,” such as the graphical Mosaic and Netscape or the character-based Lynx. We will use the Web for additional on-line material such as select articles from recent issues and guides to Middle East studies on the Internet, MESA’s presidential addresses on various states of the art, study resources and our series on recordings to professionally produced Web pages.

World Wide Web “homepages” with Middle East content are proliferating through many personal and group efforts, some of which have been noted in previous issues of this journal. In addition to these labors of love are others generated by or at Middle East Studies centers and university progams. The Bulletin will continue to note the exceptional, the handy and the publications of Middle East Studies centers or of MESA’s institutional members. Of those, the Middle East Network Information Center (MENIC) of the University of Texas at http://menic.utexas.edu was the first professional effort and is now linked to a WWW Virtual Library at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/ bySubject/Overview.html that promises to be a “distributed catalogue” professionally designed and managed by librarians. Other professional WWW offerings that have recently come on line:

• ABZU, at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago at http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU.HTML has the most comprehensive and systematically organized links to publications and organizations dealing with the ancient Near East, including the early Islamic period, plus on-line documents from archaeological site reports to journal articles and Oriental Institute reports. In particular, it has the most extensive and up-to-date listing of journals and other periodicals on the Near East that are wholly or partly on-line. This is a true scholars' resource and a virtual electronic proto-library organized by and for professionals.
• Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC) of the University of Chicago Library has made its Catalogue of Microforms Projects in Ottoman, Persian and Arabic on a wide variety of research materials originating in the Middle East available at: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/LibInfo/SourcesBySubject/ MiddleEast. The result of over 10 years of microfilming, the catalogue offers over 1400 titles ranging from popular press to journals, and from historical sources to literature and will be updated regularly as newly filmed material becomes available. Email: mideast-library@uchicago.edu
• Center for Arab Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter posts a growing body of documents on politics, economics, geography and cultures of Gulf states plus information about programs and publications in Arabic and Islamic studes at Exeter and GULFNET at http://www.ex.ac.uk/~ajrathme /arab_gul.htm.
• Center for Middle East & North African Studies at the University of Michigan at http://www/umich.edu/~iinet/cumenas has links to International Studies programs at Michigan and elsewhere plus electronic versions of the MEOC textbook evaluation project.
• Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Bergen, at http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/Institutter/smi/smi.html catalogues current and completed research projects, provides an archive of the Nordic Bulletin of Middle East Studies, book reviews and notes from Sudanic Africa (published at Bergen), guides and programs for writing Arabic on the Macintosh and other specialties of the Bergen Centre.
• Middle East Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, including faculty bios, course offerings and the Penn Center's extensive outreach efforts, are described at URL: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/mec/home.html
• Middle East Water Information Network(MEWIN) on the management and conservation of water resources in Middle Eastern countries is funded by the Ford Foundation and the World Bank “to promote peaceful, cooperative use of this vital resource, motivate sound environmental planning in this region, and to encourage the sharing of information and data.” Intended primarily for scientific and policy studies. URL: http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~mewinSOAS
• Water Issues Group has established a Water Resources Database of materials collected in connection with studies and publication and held in the Geography Department, the Centre of Near and Middle East Studies and Centre of African Studies. URL: http://www.soas.ac.uk/geography/ waterissues
• Economic Cooperation and Integration in the Middle East: A Literature Survey, edited by Andrew M. Watson, is available from the University of Toronto at http://www.utoronto.ca/cisecime. This keyword searchable bibliography results from three projects of the Centre for International Studies in collaboration with the University of Jordan, the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, the Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem and the Economic Research Forum for the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey (Cairo).

Other WWW "homepages" with Middle East content

• Model League of Arab States at Winthrop University, sponsored by the National Council on US-Arab Relations “to enable university and college students to learn more about Arab League states.” Maintained by Ed Haynes (email: haynes@acad.winthrop.edu). URL: http://192.203.180.62/index.html

• Institute for Global Conflict & Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, has a section on the Middle East that emphasizes sources and dimensions of conflict in the region, includes pointers to RAND and government laboratory studies of ecological-economic issues and to numerous student groups’ and other homepages with Middle East content at http://irpsbbs.ucsd.edu/igcc/ME.html.

• Lines in the Sand - The Pursuit of Peace in the Middle East is a new Web site at http://www.tiger.ab.ca/mideast with news stories from ITAR-TASS, The Jerusalem Post, Time-Warner, USA Today and other services, plus a news archive and on-line discussion of the peace process. Developed by Tiger Media of Calgary as a supplement to their CD-ROM of the same title that combines video, graphics and library of text for “a different way to cover a story... with a new genre of news and information products, marrying journalistic tradition with leading edge technology.”

• A hypertour of Istanbul, featuring over 45 historically interesting locations in Istanbul in some 250 JPG images and full documentation, is available at http://www.itu.edu.tr/ISTANBUL from the Istanbul Technical University. An incomplete version is available on Duke University WWW servers at URL:http://www.duke.edu/~emin/ISTANBUL Contact Emin Saglamer at emin@acpub.duke.edu.

General scholars’ aids.

• United Nations Scholars' Workstation at Yale University Library (http://www.library.yale.edu/un/unhome.htm) in conjunction with Yale's Social Science Statistical Laboratory and United Nations Studies program provides digitized texts, finding aids, data sets, maps and pointers to print electronic information on disarmament, economic and social development, environment, human rights, international relations, international trade, peacekeeping, population and demography. Guides are included to UN materials in Yale's on-line public catalog, how to search Nexis/Lexis for UN information, access to key UN web sites, descriptions of UN-related compact disks, a bibliography of recently acquired UN documentation and secondary literature and information about numeric data sets pertinent to international relations research. There are also links to other sites on the Internet, organized by the UN structure, by research topic, by geographic area or for biographical information. Maintained by Martha L. Brogan, Social Sciences Bibliographer and UN Scholars' Workstation Coordinator (email: martha_brogan@qm.yale.edu).
• The World Bank provides recent press releases on its economic research and policy recommendations, catalogues and summaries of recent publications by sector, project and part of the world, plus links to affiliated organizations, such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, at http://www.worldbank.org.
• ACCESS: An International Affairs Information Service announces a homepage at http://www.4access.org for “communication and networking among organizations working in international affairs,” with a list of ACCESS publications and sample Resource Briefs. Contact: Michael N. Mercurio, ACCESS, 1511 K Street, NW, Suite 643, Washington, DC 20005. Tel: (202)783-6050, Fax: (202)783-4767, E-mail: access@4access.org
• History Reviews On-Line “has been created... to provide reviews of books on all fields of history within six months of their appearance... and it will also offer a broader range of reviews than most print journals” including coverage of textbooks, anthologies, translations, and other non-monographic works; co-edited by Dennis Trinkle and Todd Larson, at http://www.uc.edu/www/history/reviews.html.
• Electronic Newsstand at http://www.enews.com offers selections from current and past issues of some magazines and periodicals such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, World History, Atlantic Monthly, Political Science Quarterly, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Report, World Affairs, World Politics, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and a selection of international newspapers.

Searching the World Wide Web.

Topical directories and keyword searching of titles and sometimes of content are available at a number of sites with differing emphases, capabilities and levels of sophistication that change constantly. Millions of WWW pages and other files can be found and filtered through some of the principal searching programs:

• Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) will search FTP and Gopher sites as well as WWW pages and provides topical directories.
• Lycos (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu) at Carneige Mellon University, searches its own database of millions of online files and also offers topical menus.
• Web Crawler (http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu/) originally at the University of Washington and now a part of America Online (http://webcrawler.com/), offers simple searches of WWW pages, WAIS, Gopher, Telnet and FTP sites.
• WWW Worm (http://www.cs.colorado/home/mcbryan/wwww.html) offers a high degree of customization (and/or searches; full text or headers only) for WWW searches.
• InfoSeek (http://infoseek.com), which charges a subscription fee, indexes commercial publications, newswires and magazine databases as well as select "free" Listservs, Usenet newsgroups and WWW pages and provides a much more finished output for commercial users.

Librarian-designed and library-based catalogues provide directories arranged according to standard subject classifications and have search capabilites:

• WWW Virtual Library is the beginning of a “distributed catalogue” of WWW, Gopher and FTP sites, professionally designed to Library of Congress standards and managed by librarians at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html.
• Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides at the University of Michigan Library (http://www.lib.umich.edu/chhome.html) catalogues more than 300 subject-specific guides to free Internet information resources. Recent improvements to the Clearinghouse include a new organizational scheme, an enhanced graphical interface and a series of title pages that provide consistent information about each guide. Among these subject guides is Joseph Robert’s regularly updated listing of newsgroups, listservs, Gophers, FTP and World Wide Web sites with Middle Eastern material, also available via gopher to mideast01.hum.utah.edu.
• WWLib (http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/wwlib/) offers a comprehensive catalogue of WWW pages in the UK, organized by the Dewey Decimal Classification (version 20) widely used in libraries. Sites are subject-indexed by what they are about, not just what words they contain. It is entirely free, either to search or to submit an entry.

New Gophers for Middle East studies.

• Columbia University Middle East Gopher offers program announcements, bibliographic guides and includes an on-line international directory of Middle East specialists at gopher.cc.columbia.edu:71/11/clioplus/scholarly.Center for Middle East Studies,
• Harvard University, provides descriptions of programs, announcements and connections to library resources. Gopher to haavelmo.harvard.edu:70/11/hisg/cmes.

Electronic Mailing Lists & Discussion Groups.

The National Council on US-Arab Relations sponsors an electronic mailing list for students involved in the Model Arab League and their faculty for discussion of issues, topics, procedures, national positions and current events of the Arab World relevant to the simulation of the Arab League. To subscribe, send the one-line message subscribe mlas-l followed by your first and last names to listserv@haynese.winthrop.edu. The list is maintained by Ed Haynes, Winthrop University (haynese@haynese.winthrop.edu).

Forum for Research on the Built Environment in the Middle East (UMRAN) is being formed for researchers working on the practices, history and theories of Mideastern urbanism and on the spatial problems of urbanization in the Middle East, especially from the areas of city and regional planning, architecture, historic preservation, urban design, history, geography and the social sciences. The Forum seeks to integrate researchers based in the US and Europe with those working within the Middle East to increase the exchange of ideas and diffusing general information on current research, meetings and publications. The initial offering will be an unmoderated mailing list based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, and its management will be assisted by the University of Tours’ URBAMA (Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur l’Urbanisation du Monde Arabe). To join, send a message to Fuad Malkawi (umran@dolphin.upenn.edu) with a short introduction and statement of interests Announcements to the entire list should be e-mailed to umran@pobox.upenn.edu.Adabiyat is a new electronic list for the discussion of Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Turkish literatures, both modern as well as the medieval traditions, their performance traditions, languages and genre categories. Send a one-line e-mail message, subscribe adabiyat, to majordomo@listhost.uchicago.edu.

New On-Line Publications.

Monitor, a four-page daily chronicle of events, and Prism, a twelve-page weekly review, are produced by a team of veteran analysts with capabilities in 17 languages who draw on an extensive network of correspondents and high-level contacts to follow significant events in the Russian Federation and in the 14 non-Russian countries that emerged following the collapse of the USSR. The Editor-In-Chief is Paul Goble, who has specialized for many years in the study of this region with the US State Department, Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment. Monitor and Prismare published in listserv and print versions by the Jamestown Foundation, a nonprofit educational institution devoted to the study of the former Soviet bloc countries and are distributed to subscribers worldwide via e-mail, fax and postal mail. Order via email (jfoundn@jf3.jamestown.org), Fax 202-483-8337 or postal mail to The Jamestown Foundation, 1528 18th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.

Monitor and Prism exemplify a new genre of "public intelligence" newsletter cum briefing report that is emerging from the post-Cold-War analyst community in Washington and elsewhere. Other examples are TransState Islam, a quarterly publication that tracks political Islam in the Middle East and larger Muslim world (MESA Bulletin 29(1): 38, July 1995) and the Open Media Research Institute, which took over the RFE/RL daily digests of news from the former Soviet Union (MESA Bulletin 29(1): 36, July 1995 and 22(2): 175, December 1993). Rooted in the sorts of analytical expertise developed at FBIS or among State Department and regional analysts who command specialized bodies of data, these publications aim for an objective, practitioner's analysis from publicly available information, eschew policy recommendations and stand apart from policy-driven research of advocacy groups and conventional think-tanks. They represent a privatization or migration of functions previously held (and supported) in-house in government agencies, now offered for public sale or distributed by foundations that take over specialized databases. Monitor and Prism are archived on the Internet. Gopher to: poniecki.berkeley.edu and select /archives/polish/publications/monitor/.

Middle East Business Review (URL: http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/mgt/mbr.html) will focus on cross-cultural marketing and management issues facing businesses currently operating in or considering entering Middle East markets. The MEBR will offer peer-reviewed articles by academics and other professionals on countries of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, the Levant and Turkey in the areas of consumer behavior, sales management, marketing research, strategic management, human resource management, production & operations. The first issue will be published in January 1996. Editors are Ali Alshamali, Prof. Charles Harvey, Dr. Kenneth Wild, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX (Great Britain) Tel: (01784) 44 3858 Fax: (01784) 43 9854, Email: A.Alshamali@rhbnc.ac.uk

Mamluk Studies is a new journal from the Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC) of the University of Chicago, to be published annually beginning Fall 1997, under the editorship of Bruce C. Craig. In addition, an electronic mailing list for scholars of Mamluk studies will be established at MEDOC: to join, send a one-line e-mail message, subscribe mamluk followed by your e-mail name and address, to majordomo@listhost.uchicago.edu; and Mamluk Studies: A Bibliography with more than 3400 items in a searchable format is also available via the World Wide Web. The bibliography aims to compile all research and discussion, scholarly and popular, on the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria. The WWW version of the bibliography includes introductory material to the project and a Search Page that allows the user to search by author and title, at: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/LibInfo/SourcesBySubject/MiddleEast/MamBib.htm Mamluk Studies Review, 201 Pick Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. Tel: 312-702-8426. Fax: 312-753-0569. Email: mideast-library@uchicago.edu.

Prospects.

This is a sample of the output of Middle East studies that ranges from otherwise conventional publication in an unconventional medium to publication that serves to advertise other services. This publication is frequently experimental, often ephemeral, sometimes supplemental to other activities; but its overriding characteristic is, at least potentially, to put within reach of new audiences what has previously been communicated in more restricted fashions to more limited publics. Because the medium favors multiple linkages and open-endedness, it may communicate the characteristic multivalence of area studies scholarship in the competition with a cacophony of voices there better than in arenas where the critical intermediate steps are effaced.