The essay explores the use of digital history for the systematic study of the periodical press in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean (1906 –1918) as a discursive field. It evaluates the methodological and practical challenges of digital history as rooted in the socio-technical infrastructures of the Global North when applied to the Global South. It does so using a case study of four Arabic journals from Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. After outlining the need for building a corpus and the challenges presented by this effort, this article explores a digital corpus of a total of circa 2.65 million words through (social) network analysis and stylometric authorship attribution.