Palestine Population Sources

Abstract

This research offers two major contributions to the fields of Palestine Studies and Digital Humanities. The first stage that this research needs to face is the creation of four new population sources of the Haifa, Nazareth, Jenin and Nablus sub-districts in a 1945 village boundaries based map. This brings together the 1922 census, the 1931 census and the 1938 and 1945 village statistics under the 1945 village boundaries map. The population sources of the British Mandate period contained different numbers of villages and village boundaries for each sub-district, which currently makes it impossible to work with the sources alongside one another. This research creates four new sources for the British Mandate in which every source the number of villages and boundaries are the same, redesigning the British population sources and publishing them in a comparatively meaningful fashion.

Both contributions would be filtered by a Digital Humanities approach making the data analysis and outcome accessible to all kinds of audiences. This project will enable to reach both demographers and scholars in Middle East Studies, as well as a broader public who would be given the opportunity to access complex and technical forms of historical knowledge.

There will be three main different online mapping shapefiles. The first two shapefiles will provide the audience open access to a redesigned map containing all the village names year by year and a redesigned population sources of the British Mandate period for the sub-districts under analysis. The second one, will be based on the redesigned maps that shows the behavior of the Arab and Jewish population village by village for the different time frames.