Nusaybah Bint-Ziad Mannan - UNIQ+ Research Intern, Faculty of Classics

Which research project did you work on in your UNIQ+ internship?

The description for my UNIQ+ research project said I would be working on the Manar al-Athar archive, supervised by Dr Miranda Williams, through the digital editing of images and undertaking library-based research on these photos.

I did not know entirely what this would entail practically, as I had no experience of digital humanities or archival work, but I knew that I was interested in Middle Eastern history and this drew me to this particular project.

I didn’t know what my day-to-day work would look like but I was looking forward to finding out more about the subject area, as well as what work on a digital archive could look like. My personal aim was to experience some work in the field of history or classics, as well as some experience of research, and more generally to see what work in the field of academia may perhaps look like.

What methods did you use in your project? Did you need to learn any new methods?

My research was primarily focused on caravanserais and the city of Acre in the north of the Holy Land, on the Mediterranean coast, about caravanserais in the area.

I used a variety of skills over the duration of the project, including library-based research, Photoshop editing, ARC GIS StoryMaps, writing, group work and presenting. The software and actual technical skills I used were all new to me, as was the research aspect in terms of the output, where I was writing an article to be read by a general audience, rather than an essay to be marked.

While I was able to tailor my research more to the time periods I have studied, as my supervisor perfectly allocated my topic according to my interests, much of the period that the archive covers was new to me.

What were the most important things you learned?

Perhaps the main thing, beside the new academic content I came across, was that there is work available like this which I genuinely really enjoyed. I had a very limited idea of what careers in academia could look like, and the approach that the Manar al-Athar archive is taking has interested me greatly – both in temporal and spatial scope, as well as the digital humanities and open-access approach.

Another important thing I learnt about how important it is for academic work to be accessible to the wider public – many people have little idea what goes on in a university besides lectures and teaching, and I think research especially can be hard to understand, perhaps more so in the humanities field.

Our supervisor spoke about how important these images can be for a wide range of people – people living in the Middle East, who may not be able to travel and access sites, as well as teachers and students in the UK, for example, using images as a prompt for creative writing. Making research and information available and easy to use and understand is difficult, but increasingly important, I have realised over the course of this internship.

What are your current plans for next steps in your career, and how has your UNIQ+ internship project influenced your approach?

I am definitely more interested in studying for a Master’s degree, simply because I enjoyed the experience so much. The content of my project was very interesting, and I feel that certain elements of a Master’s would be similar to this, in terms of carrying out independent research on a topic that I have come across. I liked the freedom and independence of this research, as we essentially had free-reign to take our research wherever we were interested, but with the guidance of a supervisor who could help wherever we needed it, whether that was recommending books, or identifying gaps within our writing, so the experience of research was certainly a positive one. Career-wise, I am also more confident about looking onto the heritage and humanities more widely, sectors, as I realised from this, that there is great variety in what work in these sectors can look like, and they can be very rewarding. More informally, I am excited to continue to read more around what I was researching in Oxford, as well as around other things that I saw on the Manar al-Athar archive that piqued my interest.