Introduction
"Oriental Cairo" was published in 1911 by British travel author Douglas Sladen. It is a description both of Cairo at the turn of the century and aglimpse of the perspective of the turn-of-the-century British on that city. The work is filled with photographs and commentary, maps and travel suggestions, and allusionsto the nature of the Egyptians as well as the British that are sometimes between the lines and sometimes overt. The work is a valuable insight into the ambiguousrelationship of the British with Egypt, a nation they occupied without ever officially colonizing.
Timea
Oriental Cairo is one of many artifacts and texts that have been digitized and published online by the TIMEA project . TIMEA, or Travelers In the Middle East Archive, is a digital archive of narratives documentingtravel to the Middle East published between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with images and interactive GIS maps. This course contributes tothe project by organizing a virtual research project around the electronic text of Oriental Cairo . We use the electronic text as the basis for a case study on conducting historical research and using libraryresources.
Conducting historical research
This module is designed to guide you through a variety of research tasks centered on "Oriental Cairo". It isalso designed to introduce a variety of resources available to you through a research library--for the purposes of illustration, we will focus on RiceUniversity's Fondren Library, but the approaches we detail here can be applied at other libraries as well. We will explore "Oriental Cairo" from a number of angles,namely those addressed by the list of questions that follows this introduction. We hope to demonstrate that the types of questions historians ask about specific worksoften arise, or are refined, during the research process itself. This project is a guided exploration of the research process that will enhance your knowledge of thetools of the trade and your ability to advance your own projects productively.The following list of questions are some of the basics asked at the beginning of any number of possible research projects. They are also the titles ofseveral modules designed to introduce the preliminary stages of finding answers to the questions their titles ask. Select any of the questions you see to be taken to ashort description of the content and aims of the modules they represent. While you are browsing the descriptions, select any of the links in the paragraphs to be takendirectly to that section of the module you are reading about.