Digital Humanities

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies: Mapping Checkpoints in Palestinian Women’s Cinema

Seed Grant Summer 2026 Report

Ayaat “Yoyo” Ismail

Background

This past year, I have worked on a digital humanities project with the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Fellowship. I also received a 2026 DH Summer Seed Grant that allowed me to continue my work on Cinematic Counter-Cartographies, an interactive, multi-page digital humanities site that maps checkpoints and other spaces as they appear in Palestinian women’s cinema. I began this project in December 2025 as a single map prototype. With the fellowship and seed funding, it has grown into a multi-page site now in Phase 2 of development. The project will also serve as the digital component of my dissertation, Cinematic Refusals: The Body as Archive, which examines how the body functions as an archive in Palestinian women’s film and literature produced between 2000 and 2026. This grant supported two main areas: my summer labor and the domain registration for cinematiccountercartographies.com for the next five years.

Homepage of Cinematic Counter-Cartographies

The site’s theoretical apparatus has grown alongside my dissertation research, and the two inform each other without being identical. For counter-cartography and the production of space, the site draws on Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Eyal Weizman’s “politics of verticality.” For surveillance, race, and the gendered gaze, it draws on Simone Browne and Julie Peteet’s account of carceral time. For sumud as an analytical framework, it draws on Lena Meari, Jane Busse, and Saleem Haddad. For feminist witnessing, it draws on Maria Lugones, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s account of infiltrated intimacies. Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire is also central. Where the official record constitutes an archive of what occupation permits itself to document, the body operates a repertoire, transmitting through gesture, endurance, and embodied practice what the official record refuses to keep.

Project Description

My main goal was for this project to make several guiding interventions. First, it argues that checkpoints are not passive infrastructure. We see this in the films I draw on, which present them as architectures of total surveillance, where fixed, elevated security cameras enforce panoptic visibility, control, and continuous documentation. Second, it argues that Palestinian filmmakers such as Annemarie Jacir, Farah Nabulsi, and Mai Masri do not simply record these spaces. They document them differently, producing what I call counter-cartographies: cinematic maps that refuse surveillance’s own spatial and temporal logic. Third, it treats mapping as method rather than illustration. That is my main goal. Counter-mapping has to happen in the same register as the surveillance it answers, so using location, data, and visualization against the grain of how those tools are normally deployed. You will also find a written description of where checkpoints appear across these films, and this can gesture toward my spatial argument, but a map that lets someone move through that same space, film by film and checkpoint by checkpoint, makes the spatial claim itself. And that is where this project is still moving towards.

I built the site on GitHub using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. I have also continued outreach to institutional partners, including the Palestinian Film Institute, B’Tselem, ActiveStills, and OCHA, as sources for film access and checkpoint geospatial data.


My initial planned outcomes for the seed grant were to complete the formal analysis across all checkpoint locations, then fully populate the map and the Visual Analysis Theater, write and publish the checkpoint pages and analytical essays (including What’s Not Mapped and a methodology page), and finally create an open-access bibliography. However, not everything went to plan.

Outcomes

Visual Analysis page

My formal film analysis is the heart of my projects because it involves close analysis of film through camera position, angles, movement, editing, ellipsis, sound, and offscreen space across directors and decades, placed in relation to checkpoints such as Qalandiya, Bethlehem, and Huwwara. This analysis work is now placed on the Visual Analysis page, where each film has a video carousel (due to copyright issues, my clips are embedded rather than hosted) and a written analysis of how it treats a specific type of space. I was able to get three films; however, I set out to do double that, but my time was just focused on another aspect of this site. So the results are incomplete; however, that’s expected given the amount of content I am trying to add to this site. Several of the films referenced on the page still lack a matching video clip or written analysis, and access to Palestinian films remained my project’s biggest issue. Many of them have been removed from circulation or are unavailable in certain countries, and Palestinian film archives have been targeted and destroyed.

Map page of Cinematic Counter-Cartographies

In phase 1, I built my map with Leaflet.js; I have since rebuilt the prototype with Mapbox GL JS, and the checkpoint and film archive appear as searchable, filterable panels. The main goal for visitors is to filter checkpoints by type and staffing, and films by genre, checkpoint, and year. The map has three basemaps (dark, satellite, and Street). Clicking a checkpoint icon opens a detail panel with specific information about that site and an analysis pulled from a film. The basemaps I have found label places currently by their Hebrew names, so I am having trouble finding ones that use the original Palestinian names, and I may need to create my own.

Many geotags still need to be added, and place names need correction.  As for the Whats Not Mapped, that is still part of this site. It reflects more on this archive’s own omissions as part of its argument rather than a gap to hide, which speaks to my dissertation’s interest in ellipsis and offscreen space. The site also includes a searchable glossary, an About page, and a Surveillance Space page that organizes the project around five typologies (architectural, digital, temporal, intimate, and cinematic).

Surveillance Space Page

  • Architectural: the built environment (cells, cameras, corridors, cages, and watchtowers) as an instrument of control.
  • Digital: databases, permits, biometric IDs, and population registries, surveillance that operates before and beyond any physical encounter.
  • Temporal: waiting, delay, and anticipatory punishment, with time as both a weapon and a site of resistance.
  • Intimate / Domestic: the occupation of homes, hospitals, and family life, and cinema’s claim on the right to intimacy.
  • Cinematic: how the camera itself can reproduce surveillance logic, and the formal strategies through which Palestinian filmmakers refuse it.

My fourth outcome was hoping to create an open-access bibliography on Palestinian cinema. However, as the project developed, I decided to move in a different direction: build a searchable glossary first and defer the bibliography. The glossary is more needed now, giving them the vocabulary they need to engage with the site’s analysis sections in the first place. Because my site serves academic and public audiences alike, I noted the glossary as the more essential resource. I still plan to add a bibliography in a later phase, once my content is more stable. My project moves between film studies, surveillance studies, spatial theory, Palestinian studies, and feminist theory, and the main central terms I depend on come from different fields: counter-cartography, panoptic visibility, ellipsis offscreen space, repertoire, and sumud. Without definitions, the site would be legible only to people who already know this vocabulary. I also add my own way of looking at many of these terms. The glossary helps people enter the analysis without flattening it, and it also serves as connective tissue. I made the terms on the Surveillance Space page link directly to their entries so readers can move back and forth between the examples and the concepts they illustrate. I hope to translate all of these as my bilingual interface develops.

Two developments went beyond my original plan and have made this project more accessible to all. The first is a community submission option. This lets people help build the archive by proposing new checkpoints, films, or personal experiences, and I can review each submission through a login-protected interface before publication. The second is a bilingual interface, which is under way but remains my largest work in progress. The map and related pages are being translated from English into Arabic, and I am translating into a Palestinian dialect rather than Modern Standard Arabic, since Palestinians are my main target audience. This choice slows the work, but it is central to who the site is for.

Future Directions

Over the course of the grant, I have also encountered several limitations that have shaped the project’s trajectory, and I want to be transparent about them. First, the geotags on the map page are currently inaccurate and need to be corrected. Second, the map layout names places by their Israeli names rather than their original ones. I consider this a significant ethical and analytical problem, and revising it is a priority. Third, two of the site’s data holders are not yet added to any page, and several films on the Visual Analysis page lack a matching video clip or written analysis. Finally, the site’s five-typology structure predates a shift in my dissertation, which now organizes its argument around four embodied modes: endurance, persistence, resistance, and survivance. The site will need to be reorganized so the two work together, and I expect it to keep shifting and clarify its argument as my dissertation progresses. This is important for me.

These challenges define Phase 3, which will focus on accuracy, completeness, and accessibility. My plan is to audit and correct all geotags and restore original place names throughout, complete the missing clips, analyses, and data holders, finish and review the Arabic translation, reconcile the site’s structure with the dissertation’s argument, and make each page fully active and interactive. I will also present the project to my dissertation committee in Fall 2026 as the digital component of Cinematic Refusals. Looking ahead, I hope to use the site as public-facing scholarship, and I am considering ways to show how the works speak to one another.

I want to be honest about what this support has meant to me because it truly goes beyond the project itself. I am grateful for the CHI Fellowship and the DH Summer Seed Grant, and I do not think I would have learned to code, build something on my own, or practice digital humanities as a method rather than reading about it without them. The time it has allotted me is irreplaceable. They have also connected me to a Palestinian community of filmmakers, scholars, and partner organizations, as well as, in the future, people who I now see as part of what this archive is and not only people who I hoped to reach. So when I say that the funding moved this project from a single prototype to an interactive archive that makes a spatial argument rather than just illustrating one again, I mean that as one part of it, maybe not even the largest part. What I am taking from it is the skills and the relationships to keep going, and I want to continue building this archive beyond the grant and beyond my dissertation. My goals are to complete phase 3, continue developing the bilingual interface, and defend my dissertation by Spring 2028.