future of digital research in the middle east

digital humanities often has a monitziation hint
- writing grants and tenure provides freedom
lots of digital funding is happening at corporate labs (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive to open source work)
the production of knowledge is largely visual, but rarely focuses on the systems beneath
- focus on tools and visuals, but it seems like these are largely terminal?
question: I’m a software engineer working on Arabic/English/Mandarin translation systems, and also a student at kevo studying Iraq. Cairo Geneza was floating around the software engineering communities a while ago. I’m curious if any of you had experiences in working with local technology companies within the middle east.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the bulk of research seems to be around communities that have better infrastructure (such as gulf), or fetishization on visualizations.

sahar - kuwaiti organization doing OCR
programmers in lebanon - hit or miss
akram khater - work with lebanon
RTL conference - “unofficial archive practices”