Digital Humanities in Ottoman and Middle Eastern Studies

Digital Humanities (DH) is a growing field in academia, gaining popularity through its projects, tools, and databases. As a junior PhD student in history focusing on the Middle East, I noticed the growing impact of DH projects and began exploring the relationship between Digital Humanities and Ottoman Studies. This presentation will make an introduction and overview to examples of different kinds of platforms, digital databases, 3D Modelling-VR Projects, and ongoing GIS projects to understand how Ottoman Studies reacted and adapted to developments in DH.

Starting with the most prominent history podcast platform related to Middle Eastern Studies,  Ottoman HistoryPodcast (OTSM)  launched in March 2011, long before the podcast boom. One of blessings of the digital age is the ability to create alternative academic spaces and make them widely accessible.

In the last ten years, OTSM has grown exponentially, becoming one of the largest digital resources for Ottoman and Middle Eastern Studies. Today, it is one of the main stages for showcasing recent studies and books related in the field. OTSM incorporates a large editorial and recording team from many different institutions.

The website hosts countless academic and semi-academic discussions on wide range of topics related to the cultural, sociological, literary, and economic heritage of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. Many conversations provide bibliographies and additional resources on their page. With all supplements, Ottoman History Podcast is not only a sound platform but also an essential blog for history lovers. Each episode is harmonized with curated playlists from the region, evoking the athmosphere of old radio programs. OTSM is available on different popular platforms like Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. I have some favorite instructive series like “ Making of the Islamic World ” or “ Deporting Ottoman Americans ” among its extensive collection over 500 episodes in the 11 ^th  season.

The second platform is  Digital Ottoman Studies  (DOS), a hub that integrates projects, publications, tools, and events of Digital Humanities and Ottoman-Turkish Studies together. DOS served as an inspiration for the creation of this overview/presentation as well. The platform was initiated and coordinated by  Fatma Aladağ  while  Yunus Uğur  contributed as Project Leader.

According to them, “600-year-old Ottoman Empire's archival heritage, spanning diverse ethnic and geographical regions, holds high potential for digital humanities.” Their aim is to create a digital network and collaboration by bringing researchers, institutions, and DH projects into this potential.

DOS classified the information into six categories:  Projects ,  Publications ,  Tools ,  Databases ,  Platforms  ,  DOS Projects , and  Blog . While the “Projects” section includes lists of projects related to GIS, textual, and network analysis, the “Publications” and “Blog” section collects the recent books, chapters, articles, news related to the field and includes useful tutorial entries for digital tools. Through its “Tools,” “Databases,” and “Platforms” sections, the website provides researchers with easy and convenient access to archives, manuscripts, maps and photo collections, databases, dictionaries, gazetteers, and tools.

Shortly after its foundation, DOS has already attracted significant attention in the field. It is increasingly recognized as a reference platform for DH and Ottoman Studies across various institutions.

Wikilala is a digital library that allows "research" on Ottoman published materials including newspapers, magazines, books, and documents.

"Currently, there is no library that allows curious or academic researchers to do research on Ottoman texts in the Latin alphabet. Until the age of digital printing, researchers had to scan pages, even line by line, to find what they were looking for in Ottoman texts. However, thanks to Wikilala, they can reach all the titles and content they are looking for in a single move within seconds."

The website provides easy access to millions of pages of printed documents produced over a 200-year period since Ibrahim Müteferrika established the Ottoman printing press in the 18th century. It hosts a vast amount of knowledge across various disciplines, including science, culture, art history, literature, and architecture.

The helpful feature of Wikila is the ability to make keywords over Ottoman printed documents. Based on the document types, Wikilala classifies the results for your search.

Ottoman court registers are one of the essential primary sources for understanding the social, legal, and economic aspects of historical Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

"In these court books, there are not only records of legal disputes that have been brought to court, but also records similar to today's municipal transactions and notary records. Documents for tradesmen, craftsmen, such as foundation bills, sales, donations, loan transactions, as well as prices of products sold in markets, regulations and standards related to tradesmen; civil law records such as inheritance divisions, wills, marriages and divorces; copies of the decrees and edicts coming from the center regarding the reconstruction and repair of foundations and/or public buildings are also included. There is also interesting information about non-Muslims among the cases in the courts."

Under the coordination of  ISAM-"Center for Islamic Studies,"  more than 100 sharia court registers have been transliterated and digitized. These records cover various courts from different neighborhoods of Istanbul, spanning from the 15th to the 19th centuries.

This data provides an opportunity to examine the smallest details of the cultural, economic, and legal life of the Ottoman Empire, as well as how the law was applied in practice and the extent of the Ottoman legal order.

The digital database is an efficient resource for researchers. All digitized entries are searchable using Latin script. The search results display the original document of each case alongside its transliteration, allowing for direct comparison with the original source.

Hajj Trail is a historical simulation game designed to take players on a pilgrimage during the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. It is a free-to-play, text- and image-based storytelling experience.

"The annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam and incumbent upon all able-bodied Muslims once during their lifetimes. It was arguably the largest seasonal migration of people in the early modern world from year to year bringing people together from as far apart as West Africa to Southeast Asia. In the seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire oversaw the management of the Mecca and the largest pilgrimage caravans which traveled along the road to them, known by the Ottomans as the Darb al-Hajj [translated as The Hajj Road or loosely as The Hajj Trail]. The purpose of this educational historical simulation is to bring students along that same journey and understand how the hajj fit into the larger social, political, and cultural world of the Ottoman Empire and beyond."

The game features multiple routes to Mecca, including from Istanbul, Sarajevo and Damascus. Each route requires a different amount of playing time.

Also, it has option to play with different characters comes with different scenarios.

The historical events during the journey are conveyed to the traveler in the light of historical documents. Each stop includes quotes from primary sources to give students a sense of maintain a realistic travel atmosphere in the past. It is an excellent activity designed for students and the public to understand Early Modern Ottoman Empire, the Muslim world, discover the routes of Hajj, and trace towns, places, and activities along the routes.

SpatioScholar is a visual data management system designed for a temporal spatial scholarship and analysis. The patform allows visualizing the temporal dimension along with physicality of the space. Also, it allows scholars to work with 3D models and primary sources by facilitating relation between sources and the spatial context.

"SpatioScholar provides a computational close reading system for spatial and temporal data sets by using the following functionalities: (1) through a timeline slider, it demonstrates the phases through which a certain building or location passed; (2) through a simulation, it provides the viewer with the ability to experience the space in first person, to track any desired aspect of life inside buildings or locations; (3) through a reconnection of the primary materials and the conclusions derived from them, viewers can browse and review the relevant information (photographs, drawings, textual primary documents etc.) that are cross-referenced with the “scene;” and (4) through a “Shared Scholarship” feature, viewers and users can leave notes, comments or browse others’ notes."

This system is a product of The SpatioScholar project emerged from  Burcak Özlüdil 's specific case study. In her dissertation, Madness and Empire: The Ottoman Asylum, 1830–1930, Özlüdil examined how the buildings transformed over time and what life in these spaces looked like. This case study brought together Ulysee Thompson, Augustus Wendell, and Burçak Özlüdil to work on visualizing her data. They developed SpatioScholar for scholars interested in data visualization and storytelling through 3D modeling.

"September 1955 is a 10-minute virtual-reality documentary of the Istanbul Pogrom, a government-initiated organized attack on the minorities of Istanbul on September 6-7, 1955. This interactive installation places the viewer in a reconstructed photography studio in the midst of the pogrom, allowing one to witness the events from the perspective of a local shop-owner."

This project provides extensive historical data as layers on historical maps, integrated with today's view of Istanbul. It also presents individual stories to illustrate urban transformation and its effects.

It is possible to explore interactive historical maps to understand changes in various aspects of Istanbul, such as housing, roads, buildings, and neighborhoods.

"Integrating architecture and urbanism into digital and spatial humanities, the project explores how emerging spatial and visual tools advance the field of history and urban research."

It is created as part of the project called "'I am Istanbul" which is an interactive web-based storytelling platform, pulling the curtains back and inviting viewers to observe the ever changing flow of daily life in Istanbul throughout the 20th century via the lives of fictional characters.

This project aims to interpret Ottoman inscriptions on historical monuments and buildings such as fountains, mosques, and houses. It develops a searchable digital database containing transliterations and images of all Turkish, Arabic, and Persian architectural inscriptions.

The main motivation of the project is the preservation of these inscriptions, which contain valuable information about the founder, builder of the monuments, and the neighborhood in a literary form, protecting them from disappearing over time. The alarming loss, damage, and theft of numerous inscriptions encouraged the project team to create this database.

It is a searchable database by keyword. Additionally, users can explore monuments and their details through an interactive online city map. All relevant information, including location data, historical background of the monuments, sources, and transliterations of the inscriptions, has been added to Google Maps as layers. The project includes monuments from Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa.

This database serves as a valuable resource for researchers in the fields of Ottoman urban history, art history, literature, philology, and prosopography.

The popularization of history through DH platforms, the development of more tools and projects, the extraction of additional data, material analyses, and the creation of digital contexts for ongoing studies all contribute to the deeper integration of DH with various fields, as well as regional and global historiographies.

The presence of different projects and their digital content related to Ottoman and Middle Eastern Studies benefits both the public and professionals. The growing number of such projects indicates that Ottoman Studies has actively responded to advancements in Digital Humanities and has begun integrating with related initiatives.

I am grateful for the opportunity to explore and benefit from these projects and platforms, and I look forward to seeing new initiatives emerge in this field.