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Launching Mircap: research management on the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula: from the field to a collaborative platform

https://mircap.huma-num.fr/en/

The Mircap project is proudly a part of the French national plan for Open Access Science. With the aim of “democratizing access to knowledge, useful for research, training, economy and society”, the MIRCAP project offers a collection of more than 20 years of a large set of data from two major projects in Jordan (Wadi Rum) and Saudi Arabia (Kilwa).

Seeking to bring public-financed research out of the restricted sphere of closed databases, the platform disseminates research funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development in tandem with the Service of Cooperation and Cultural Action and headed by Professor Saba Fares.

The data seeks to tend to the gaps in study of pre-Islamic Arabia and its geo-climatic environment. The information on this platform addresses a number of issues and as such tend to both ecological and historical studies as well as understandings of contemporary social issues such as population displacement. It provides an analysis of ancient texts, language, the change in Arabic dialect in the region. Locating places with an abundance of water provided insight into the changing movements of the ancient nomadic populations. As such, a unique nexus of social sciences versus hard sciences is presented here. However, critically, this platform has been created in order to share this information widely and allow researchers to make use of this data in their own work. It is the main goal of this platform to provide intricate information that can be used internationally by scientists, social scientists, and the curious individual alike. This open-access platform is also geared as a contribution to national French efforts to disseminate information widely for the general public, justly, with no cost.  

This project is the awarded from of the PACA Region’s call for tenders which is part of the 2015-2020 State-Region Plan Contract which “sets the course for State and Regional action for the next six years in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur”.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Saba Farès (May 6, 2020). Launching Mircap: research management on the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula: from the field to a collaborative platform. Men and the desert. Retrieved March 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/t9o4


Saba Farès

Professor of Languages and Cultures of Ancient Arabia. My main research topics are i. Religious Landscape and Sacred Ground ii. Territories and borders of Arabian tribes in North Arabia Peninsula based on epigraphic documents

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