Country of Words
Reviewed by: Alex Lee
Review date: March 22, 2025
Site Link: https://countryofwords.org/index.html
Archive Link: https://archive.ph/mVzag
Keywords: Postcolonial Studies, Archiving, Digital Ecologies and Communities, Spatial and Spatio-temporal Analysis
Data Sources:
- Records of Palestinian literary figures, including dates of birth and death, as well as their global movements mapped over time
- Records of periodicals publishing Palestinian literature, including country of origin, publisher, and dates of publication
- Audio interviews with 10 figures of Palestinian literary history
- Contemporary archival photographs and prints
Processes:
- Data was sourced from physical archives to build the database, with some of it being photographed or scanned in order to appear on the website.
- Data was cleaned and structured into formats that could be visualized and interconnected using the OmekaS database and custom-built visualization tools.
Presentation:
The project is a web-based multimedia archive. Readers can use multiple digital tools — including timelines, network graphs, and other visualizations like bar charts — to explore Palestinian literary history, figures, and sources across time and space.
The site’s landing page features a description of the project on a white banner with fuzzy borders that runs laterally across the page. It is surrounded above and below by a blue header and footer. The header contains changing media, including photographs of people, signs and other symbols, woodblock illustrations, and a digital map of place names associated with network nodes (also shown statically in the page footer). The overall appearance of the landing page evokes themes of separation and distance (suggested by the vast white space between the two blue banners) as well as the image of clouds in the sky.
Digital Tools Used:
- CARTO and OpenStreetMap for maps.
- OmekaS database to organize materials and features, as well as Sanity Studio as a content management system (CMS).
- Site designed using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, hosted in a LAMP server environment that runs on Ubuntu v20.04.6 STANDARD virtuozzo.
Languages:
- The site communicates almost exclusively in English, although some names are also provided in Arabic.
Review
“Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature” is the result of research carried out through PalREAD, an initiative funded by the European Research Council’s Starting Grant and hosted at Freie Universität Berlin from 2018 to 2023. Led by Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh, the PalREAD team investigated how displacement and exile challenge what it means to analyze and historicize the literature of a nation, in this case Palestine. Stanford University Press published the “Country of Words” digital project in 2023 and continues to host the site.
“Country of Words” traces the literary history of the Palestinian nation and people, including its diaspora, from 1880 to 1994. The project seeks to offer a continuous, linked literary history that revolves around the literary production not of a nation-state but of a people spanning multiple continents.
The project relies primarily on periodicals to track the movement and activity of Palestinian writers. It takes as its starting point the Mahjar, a wave of migration to the Americas that symbolized “the first period featuring a transnational expansion of Palestinian literary geography.” The Mahjar is the first of seven total time periods represented in “Country of Words” and the first of four such time periods focused on diasporas.
Dr. Abu-Remaileh traces the histories of each time period through multimedia essays, including text, static images (including photographs or scans of historical documents), interactive geographic maps, and data visualizations like bar charts, timelines, and network graphs. Within each essay, nominal concepts (such as names, publications, and periods) can be clicked to reveal metadata from the database (such as descriptions and start/end dates) in a manner similar to an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia.
The seven interlinked essays are the primary, but not the only mode of engaging with the site. After entering the site, a user lands on the timeline interface that defines the seven periods and links to each of the essays. But a navigation menu at the top of the window highlights three routes through the material in addition to the timeline: “Network,” “Visualizations,” and “Audio Interviews.” As the first two options suggest, users can jump to concentrated collections of the rich network graphs and data visualizations provided throughout the essays. The fourth option, “Audio Interviews,” includes ten oral histories conducted with Palestinian literary figures.
There is also a second navigation “hamburger” menu running vertically along the left side of the window. It offers the same options as the top navigation menu, as well as the ability to return to “Home” (the site’s landing page) as well as to visit an “About” page. It’s unclear why there are two navigation menus that mirror one another — I found it to be an obstacle to my efforts to understand the site’s organizing logic or structure.
Beyond this minor detail, the site’s form and substance work in tandem to make for a continuously engaging and mostly frictionless experience — including the essays themselves, which balance depth of research with readability. The range of data visualizations showcases the many ways digital humanities tools can augment literary and historical analysis.
There are many possible entry points into the material, from qualitative and quantitative representations of the data to the audio interviews. If anything, I found myself wishing for a more top-down meta-description (beyond what’s found on the landing page) that would explain the decisions governing the site’s structure and logic — not only the way it was designed from a UX perspective, but also why it was periodized in this way.
How are the collaborative aspects reflected in the project and are there elements that work particularly well?
Nearly every aspect of this project relied on collaboration and shared expertise. On the back end, the project team worked with the University of Bologna’s Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre to customize the database. On the front end, they partnered with design studio Calibro to build a custom visualization tool, as well as two Arabic podcast companies — Sowt and Kerning Cultures — to produce a podcast featuring the ten oral histories.
Do you see an opportunity for collaboration that would be helpful to the project?
Despite the collaborative effort behind this project, only Dr. Abu-Remaileh’s name appears (and quite prominently) on the landing page. This led me to believe, at first, that it was an entirely solo endeavor. If the team behind this project wanted to better emphasize the collaborative element, the landing page design could be a good place to start.
I would also like to better understand how other scholars periodize Palestine’s literary history. Given the site’s flexibility, it would be fascinating to see others’ complementary or even competing conceptions alongside Dr. Abu-Remaileh’s work. This would help further problematize the desire and need to constrain such a dynamic history into discrete periods or time frames.