Category Archives: All AKDC News

ARCHNET Content Manager to Participate in Bicentennial Conference of the Tangier American Legation, Morocco

Michael Toler, Archnet Content Manager, will participate in the annual April Seminar of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies, headquartered in the old American Legation in the medina of Tangier, Morocco. Though the building has completely transformed over the past 200 years, the property was originally gifted to the young nation of the United States in 1821, making 2021 the bicentennial anniversary of the Legation. In celebration of the occasion and the long friendship between the United States and Morocco that it represents, this year’s annual April Seminar has the theme of “The Tangier American Legation’s First 200 […]

Archnet To Be Featured at Upcoming SHASS Digital Collaborative Session

On February 25, 2021, the AKDC will present “Archnet 3.0: Enhancing Archnet for Teaching in the Digital Humanities” as part of the SHASS Digital Teaching and Research Collaborative Sessions at MIT. SHASS Digital Teaching and Research Collaborative Sessions take place each Thursday from 4:30-5:30 during the term. What is “Archnet 3.0”? AKDC@MIT and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture are currently in the process of re-developing Archnet, a freely accessible resource focused on the built environment in societies influenced by Muslim culture. Archnet’s mission is to provide ready access to unique textual and media material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and […]

AKDC@MIT and The Met Museum Collaborate to make images available on Archnet

The Aga Khan Documentation Center has collaborated with the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) to digitize, catalog, and make available a number of historical photographs of Islamic architecture. The photos, most of which date between the 1880s and 1950s, show some of the great monuments of the Islamic tradition, both general and detailed views, often before modern restoration projects. The first batch of nearly 300 photos is now available on Archnet. These are among the oldest of the collection, taken by pioneering photographers such as the Turkish photographer Pascal Sébah, his son Jean […]

AKDC Staff participating in panel on Digital Humanities + Islamic Visual Culture in the annual conference of the College Art Association

Matt Saba, AKDC Visual Resources Librarian, a and Glaire Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh, have organized and will chair a panel on Digital Humanities + Islamic Visual Culture for the 109th Annual Conference of the College Art Association to be held online February 10-13, 2021. The panel is sponsored by the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA). The panel includes 4 presentations: “Soft Eyes: Software’s Visualities and Islamic Art History in the Digital Age” by Hussein Keshani, The University of British Columbia “Animating an Amulet: 3D Modeling, Materiality, and a Medieval Arabic Amulet Scroll” […]

Archnet Content Manager invited to participate in “Preserving and conveying memory to foster Alterity.”

Michael Toler, Archnet Content Manager, has been invited to participate in a webinar, “Préserver et transmettre la mémoire pour ancre l’Altérité,” organized by the Ta’aruf Center of the Rabita Mohammedia Al Ulema in Morocco. The event takes place January 25-28, is part of a continuing dialogue on “how to resolve a number of tensions which have ossified the dialogue between cultures and religions. The issues around memory – how to preserve it and pass it on to the next generations – seem to be a major challenge for our societies in terms of peacebuilding and encouraging open-mindedness to the notion […]

AKDC to offer Introduction to Islamic Calligraphy

In collaboration with calligrapher and graphic designer Sangeetha Kowsik, AKDC@MIT will offer an introductory workshop on “Arabic Calligraphy: An Artistic Journey from Kufic to Contemporary Design,” January 14, 2021 from 2 to 4 PM EST, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP). The workshop introduces a brief history of Arabic calligraphy, a tradition whose practice spans more than one thousand years and continues today, where it is globally recognized for its unique aesthetics of geometric proportion and sinuous curve. In the first part of this workshop, the most important of the classical Arabic scripts are introduced through famous examples of artworks, […]

IAP Presentation: Spies, Pirates, and Atlas Lions: US-Moroccan Relations through the lens of the Tangier American Legation

AKDC@MIT is organizing a presentation, “Spies, Pirates, and Atlas Lions: US-Moroccan Relations through the lens of the Tangier American Legation,” on Tuesday, January 19, 2021, 4 to 5:30 pm. The lecture is part of the Independent Activities Period (IAP) offerings of the MIT Libraries. The old American Legation in the medina (walled city) of Tangier, Morocco holds a number of distinctions. It is the first property the United States owned abroad, it is the only overseas site on the National Register of Historic Places, and it was an active diplomatic structure longer than any other diplomatic presence of the US […]

Content added to Archnet in 2020

2020 has been an unusually difficult year around the world, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As universities took courses online, Archnet.org, a joint project of the Aga Khan Documentation Center of the MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT) and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) worked with our partners step up the pace through which we made available quality resources for studying Islamic architecture and the built environment of Muslim societies more broadly. Approximately 3,350 new records have been published on Archnet so far this year. In addition to making over 2,700 new images available for download, we have also published records […]

Where did Archnet users come from in 2020?

Between January 1 and December 7, 2020, the total number of Archnet users rose by 6.4% over the same period in 2019. These users viewed a total of nearly 3 million records, 12% more than they viewed in 2019. Use of Archnet has risen steadily since 2015, the first full year for which we have reliable statistics on our current platform. To date, visitors have come to Archnet from more than 200 countries or territories, but the largest user groups are in India (21%), the United States (14%), and Turkey (6%). Social media has become a more significant source of […]

Nur Sobers-Khan appointed Program Head

We are thrilled to share the announcement that Nur Sobers-Khan has been appointed Program Head for the Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT). Reporting to Emilie Hardman, Head of the Libraries Distinctive Collections (DDC), the Program Head is a critical leadership position responsible for stewarding and developing collections, services, and programs to support the information needs of the faculty, students, and researchers of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. It also provides oversight of Archnet in partnership with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and engages in other innovative collection […]