× About this platform

Overview

This platform allows you to navigate geographically and chronologically through the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA), an archive of over one thousand hours of interviews with Palestinians who lived through the Nakba, hosted by the American University of Beirut (AUB).

Navigating the map

To find interviews relating to a specific landmark, you have four ways to navigate:

Zooming, panning and clicking manually to discover landmarks.

Filtering through the list of currently visible landmarks on the left tab.

Filtering the landmarks by category in the layers panel, on the right.

Searching through all of the landmarks with the search bar in the top menu.

Once you select a landmark, you will be presented with a list of interviews in which the landmark is mentioned. Clicking on any of the interview titles will bring you to the corresponding interview on main POHA website.

Navigating the timeline

In the timeline, simply scroll to find an event of interest and click to view the related POHA interviews. The events are colour-coded by type, including battles (orange), massacres (red) and other events (blue).

Credits

This platform was developed by Ahmad Barclay with the support of a POHA Fellowship and the POHA team at AUB. It was first launched in June 2019, and was updated and expanded in December 2019.

The landmarks that you can see were located based on the metadata contained within the POHA database.

The historical background map layer is provided by Palestine Open Maps, a project initiated and supported by Visualizing Palestine, and also supported by the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship. The map layer is compiled from over two hundred map sheets at various scales (from 1:1,250 to 1:250,000) produced by the British Mandate Survey of Palestine, mostly during the 1940s.

The html template for the platform was adapted from Bootleaf, developed by Brian McBride, which is available under and MIT license. Bootleaf combines the Javascript libraries Leaflet.js (slippy maps engine) and Typeahead.js (auto-fill search) with Bootstrap (a responsive front-end framework). The timeline code is based on Timesheet.js.

Limitations

Although this platform and the main POHA website can be navigated in English and Arabic, the interviews themselves are in Arabic only, and at present do not have subtitles or transcripts available in other languages.

The landmarks presented on this platform only represent a fraction of those included in the POHA database. This is due to a number of reasons, in particular:

The manual process of locating the landmarks on historical maps.

The fact that a number of the landmarks mentioned (eg. coffee shops and small businesses) are not marked on historical maps.

The fact that some landmarks (particularly natural features) were referred to by a number of different names, only one of which appears on historical maps.

Additionally, in some cases, multiple landmarks have the same name (eg. some prophets have shrines in a number of villages). This means that some interviews may be erroneously associated with a landmark with the right name but in the wrong location.

At present, the events in the timeline only relate to the period at the height of the Nakba (November 1947 to December 1948). This is both due to the importance of highlighting oral testimonies of these events, and since this is the period most thoroughly indexed in the POHA database.

Finally, the links to the interviews on the POHA site do not correspond to the specific point or segment where the landmark is mentioned.