The MaDiH (مديح): Mapping Digital Cultural Heritage in Jordan, Opportunities and Limitations

MaDiH (مديح): Mapping Digital Cultural Heritage in Jordan is an AHRC/Newton funded collaborative project between King’s Digital Lab (KDL), the Hashemite University, the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the Jordanian Open Source Association, and the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project. The project aims to contribute to the development of Jordan’s digital cultural heritage by identifying systems, datasets, standards, and policies, and aligning them to government digital infrastructure capabilities and strategies. The MaDiH data catalogue or, in future, repository includes datasets that have been created over the past 50 years by archaeological teams, official institutions, museums, research institutions, or individuals from Jordan and other countries such as the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, Japan, and Canada.

In total 325 datasets on Jordanian cultural heritage were recorded in the MaDiH CKAN repository. This representative sample is designed to be the core of the prototype for a national data catalogue using CKAN (ckan.org), an open-source data publishing tool for data collection. The project represented stage one of a larger three stage vision to ‘Map’, ‘Build’ and ‘Deliver’ enhanced Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) capability for Jordan. MaDiH (مديح) sits at the intersection of numerous currents in contemporary DCH activity. It engages in long-standing practices such as software engineering, information management, data curation, open knowledge, and archive management informed by more recent initiatives such as Critical Infrastructure Studies, Postcolonial Digital Humanities (DH), Indigenous DH, and Global DH.