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. The domain name has not been fully released to me yet, though.
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.
Outcomes
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.
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.
Future Directions
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.