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June 03, 2009
There's that whooshing sound of free-time escaping...
My days of having nothing to do (but what a nice four days they were) are very much over. I have started my work for the Arab-West Report, and the last three days have kind of been a blur as a result. Though to be fair, some of that might be the fact that it was 110 today.
Life at the Arab-West Report has been interesting. A small operation, the entirety of the Report is within one second floor apartment (although we're taking over the third). That said, a lot happens there. There are two main functions being served at any given time: first, the translation and summarization of Arabic Egyptian press articles each week that deal with religion, freedom of speech, government, corruption/wrongdoing, sectarian violence/conflict, discrimination, and perceptions of foreign events. Secondly, these same stories and editorials are analyzed, fact-checked, investigated, and researched for trends in coverage, bias, and tropes within their style for certain issues, which is then reported on. So, to use a rather random, but simple example, of a story I came across today from the spring of 2008 on a fatwa issued by a Sheikh of al-Azhar (the premier center for Sunni Islamic scholarship and religious decisions) that Muslims should keep their prayers during work to ten minutes. This column would have been translated by team one, and put into the Arab-West Report online ( http://www.arabwestreport.info ). Later on, someone looking into how, say, fatwas are treated in Egyptian media would then have flagged this story along with others on fatwas, probably interviewed journalists, editors, and sheikhs (ideally, the ones involved in the stories and others) about the issue, and checked relevant information (e.g. Egyptian law, the Qur'an, et cetera), and then compiled a paper with a title like, "The Coverage of Fatwas in the Egyptian Print Media in 2008," which would be added to the online Arab-West Report as well (again, http://www.arabwestreport.info ). In this process, my job has become the latter portion of the organization.
My specific research task at hand? I have been asked to work with the media coverage of Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church within the recent years (I have a huge amount of articles available, and will probably be putting some chronological cap on which I am using to reduce the amount). This can literally be as many as thirty articles per week, and I have at least twelve years available to me easily should I choose to use them. It is a phenomenal data set to be working with, and I have already been drawn into the interesting field of Egyptian papal reporting. At this point, I've mostly been familiarizing myself with the articles themselves (a task I imagine will take most of June, if not more as there are well into the thousands of them), before getting ready to schedule interviews with journalists, editors, Coptic bishops and priests, and laypeople (Copt and non-Copt). It is a sizable task, and I am incredibly excited to be working on it.
Just one more shameless free advertising space to the Arab-West Report – http://www.arabwestreport.info – seriously, I advise looking at the website. It is really interesting and there is a lot to look at there.
Posted by Alexander Steven Wamboldt at June 3, 2009 01:23 PM
Comments
Alex, you continue to teach me. I had no idea what "tropes" were, but have since looked them up and discovered what it is that you are looking for in these stories. Interesting. The work sounds intense, but what a joy to be able to focus on one topic and distill what you think will be most important. Have fun! M
Posted by: Marianne Wamboldt at June 5, 2009 05:10 PM
Alex, you continue to teach me. I had no idea what "tropes" were, but have since looked them up and discovered what it is that you are looking for in these stories. Interesting. The work sounds intense, but what a joy to be able to focus on one topic and distill what you think will be most important. Have fun! M
Posted by: Marianne Wamboldt at June 5, 2009 05:10 PM
