Une histoire du Moyen-Orient par les sources numériques ? Méthodes et enseignements d’une historiographie en construction à partir du web iranien

Abstract

The role of social networks and the Web in the popular uprisings of 2009 and 2011 in the Middle East has become the main narrative of a “digitalised democratic revolution” in English-language studies, most of the time at the expense of a qualitative analysis of digital data for research in the humanities and social sciences. This article aims to rethink the history of the contemporary Middle East based on a close reading and qualitative analysis of digital traces. It will first review the scientific literature on the digital Middle East, before proposing in the second part, based on the Iranian case, the application of different qualitative methods for the identification of digital practices, Web mapping and the different “traces” disseminated online, as defined by Carlo Ginzburg in his “indiciary paradigm” (1980).

Keywords

• Middle East
• Iran
• Digital Humanities
• Web archives
• digital social networks
• Web mapping