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Zeina Dghaim founded the Data Art Project (DAP) in 2019. She is a Canadian Lebanese Digital Humanities researcher, museologist, artist, and cultural steward.
I draw from the data embedded in world cultures and translate it through diverse tools to create works that inspire people to reconnect with their imagination, rekindle awe, nurture ethical creativity, and cultivate conscientiousness. Our purpose is to foster kinship among communities through a deeper understanding of human experiences and creations. DAAHT is a space where data, art, heritage, culture, and technology work in harmony for the benefit of humanity.
Data Art, Artefacts, and Heritage Translation (DAAHT) explores the data embedded in literary texts, objects, and places. It approaches writing, artefacts, and heritage sites as carriers of knowledge and meaning, revealing human purpose through stories and structures encoded within language and matter. Through data-driven artistic and interpretive translation, DAAHT transforms these hidden layers into visual and digital experiences that foster cultural literacy, knowledge sharing, and awareness. It is a creative practice and a form of inquiry, one that connects data, art, literature, and heritage to illuminate how culture stores and communicates meaning across time, medium, and form. Through this process, we also preserve the work of our ancestors, respecting their acheivements, and learning from their rewards and struggles.
I use the word translation because we are translating heritage, artefacts, and literary texts as a conscious act of sharing knowledge with those who may not understand where we come from or why cultures and behaviours look or feel the way they do. The human experience is vast and diverse; we do not all experience and interpret life or its events in the same way. The diversity of what we create, like food, songs, paintings, architecture, and other forms of expression, reveals how we have adapted to our environments and resources, shaping distinct ways of living and understanding the world. When we translate these experiences, we enable others to learn from our lives and perspectives while preserving our heritage. This exchange fosters empathy, kindness, and kinship, and ultimately, we hope, nurtures peace among people by deepening our understanding of one another.
Through literature, I learned about the human condition, cultures, and the search for meaning in a world that is chaotic and full of wonder. DAAHT was born from this understanding, an appreciation for how humanity has shared wisdom and struggle through art, literature, and architecture, each a gate of creativity and a message connected to the Divine.
The project emerged during my doctoral journey, when I noticed the gradual disappearance of literature from universities. I wondered whether the works of some of my favourite thinkers like Frye, Cervantes, Aquinas, Gibran, Borges, and Saint Teresa of Ávila could be reactivated through a new lens, one that merges computational analysis with creative translation and interpretation. I started translating the works of Santa Teresa de Ávila as a first trial, and DAAHT was born. DAAHT transforms data into visual narratives, inviting imagination to uncover what words cannot. It is inspired by the Ten Oxherding Pictures that reveal truth through the harmony of image, text, and reflection.