Abu Dhabi Calling!: Exploring Abu Dhabi phone directories (1970-2000)
The “Abu Dhabi Calling!” project uses city telephone directories from the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, over the period 1970-2000 as research tools for urban history. Through studying the telephone directory–itself a highly globalized object with its share of documentary shortcomings–we aim to understand temporal and locational patterns of markers of national belonging and religious identification in the capital city.
The collection of printed “White Pages”-style city phone directories gifted to NYUAD Archives and Special collections as a part of the Frauke Heard Bey and David Heard collection (1970-2005) contains in toto some 500K names of individuals and businesses, providing a particularly rich opportunity to study both the spatial and demographic features of this super-diverse society and the development of access to postal and communications infrastructure, Internet and mobile telephony in the late twentieth century. The data of phone books document a period of rapid, yet planned, development during which the city’s population expanded twentyfold, from 62000 in 1970 to nearly 1.5M in 2021.
The “Abu Dhabi Calling!” draws inspiration from other studies of phone directories in Western cities (Paris, New York, New Orleans) but the late twentieth-century phone book has an organizational structure imported from a Western context which is not always a perfect container for information about this non-Western city. As such, the project aims to expand the notion of historical collaborative geocoding beyond the Western urban contexts, bringing it to the study of the Arab region.
Figure 1. Reconstructing the exchange map for Abu Dhabi. Point data of corner groceries (baqala-s) from OpenStreetMap overlaid on sectors of the city (sector datasource: geosmart.dmt.gov.ae)
The Abu Dhabi Calling! project is using directories from the following years: 1971, 1972, 1982-83, 1984-85, 1985-86, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2004, 2004 (mobile edition), 2006 (mobile edition). If you have other years that you would like to loan our project or to gift to NYUAD Archives and Special Collections, please contact us.
As of Spring 2021, the entire collection of Abu Dhabi directories has been completely imaged and we are now in the phase of information extract using Tesseract and code modified from the NYC Historical City Directories project.
The Abu Dhabi Calling! Project was the recipient of a NYU Digital Humanities Seed Grant in 2020.