David H. Wells

For more than 10 years, Moroccan native and New York resident Hatim Belyamani has focused his non-profit Remix⟷Culture on offering digital sample and remix tools that give exposure and preserve access for traditional acoustic music around the world.

Compact in size yet complex in the scenes they depict, stone cylinders—many no larger than your thumb—were a popular medium for Mesopotamian artisans talented enough to reverse-carve semiprecious stones and produce unique, often mythological tableaux in astonishingly sensitive, naturalistic detail. Their craft gave each seal’s owner a personalized graphic signature for use with the most popular media channel of the third millennium BCE: damp clay. Seal impressions certified ownership, validated origins, attested to debts, secured against theft and more. Many seal cylinders were drilled so they could be strung and carried as amulets and status symbols—uses that may find echoes among today’s compact, personalized communication devices.

About the size of a tablet computer, astrolabes were tools of astronomers, surveyors and navigators, to name a few. But using them took a lot more than typing, tapping and swiping.

State Highway 37, near Orchha, Madhya Pradesh, Central India

Media scholar Jack Shaheen spent more than 50 years not only studying the us entertainment industry’s depictions of Arabs and Muslims but also collecting them. Now archived at New York University, the Jack G. Shaheen Collection shows graphically why stories, words and pictures matter.

Born in a refugee camp in Kenya, 19-year-old Somali-American designer Sahro Hassan has won awards as well as acclaim in her hometown of Lewiston, Maine, for “modest fashion” that can appeal to Muslim and non-Muslim women alike.