Collaborations

Mapping al-Shawwam is at an early stage of development. Its core architecture is functional, but its coverage remains limited by the sources and spatial data currently available. Expanding that coverage requires collaboration: people and institutions with access to materials, expertise, or capacities the project cannot reach on its own.

This is not a finished system seeking users. It is an infrastructure under construction, designed to grow through partnership. Early collaborators will shape what the platform becomes—its datasets, its interpretive range, and its standards for handling uncertainty, contradiction, and partial evidence. The platform is built to make evidentiary limits visible rather than resolve them prematurely.

Source preparation for ingestion

The platform depends on documentary sources: travel accounts, administrative records, cadastral surveys, genealogical registers, and geographic dictionaries. We are seeking collaborators who can contribute at any stage of the preparation pipeline:

• Digitization — scanning or photographing materials not yet available in digital form
• Transcription — converting Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, or other manuscript and print sources into machine-readable text
• Collection access — connecting the project with archives, libraries, or private collections holding relevant materials

We handle data structuring and ingestion internally. What we need is access to sources and assistance preparing them for that process.

Boundary and network data

The platform's spatial layers remain incomplete. We are seeking vector data—whether existing datasets or newly produced—for:

• Administrative boundaries — Ottoman vilayets, sanjaks, and kazas; Mandate-era divisions; contemporary administrative units
• Historical polities — Ayyubid, Mamluk, and earlier territorial formations
• Customary territories — tribal, sectarian, or other non-state jurisdictions
• Routes and networks — roads, paths, trade corridors, and pilgrimage routes, including nodes, linkages, and historical labels

If you have created or have access to GIS data for any of these, or if you have the capacity to georectify historical maps or trace boundaries from archival sources, we would like to hear from you.

We welcome inquiries from:

• Historians and historical geographers working on the Levant across any period
• GIS professionals and cartographers with experience in historical or administrative mapping
• Archivists and librarians stewarding relevant collections
• Community and diaspora historians with oral, genealogical, or local knowledge
• Graduate students seeking collaborative research or data partnerships

The platform is designed to preserve provenance and attribution. All contributions remain traceable, allowing downstream researchers to cite original sources and collaborators directly.

If you are interested in contributing sources, spatial data, or expertise, please use the contact form to describe what you might bring to the project. We respond to all serious inquiries.

All contributions are credited. Data donors remain visible in metadata fields; collaborators are acknowledged on the Team & Attributions page and in release notes. Code and site content are distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0, unless otherwise noted.