Digital Frontiers of Ottoman Studies

Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1:1-2 (2014): 37-51 Chris Gratien, Michael Polczyński, and Nir Shafir Digital Frontiers of Ottoman Studies Keeping track of the emerging body of digital resources for the humanities and social sciences may sometimes seem a daunting task. Even more challenging is following the burgeoning set of methods and media captured by the umbrella term of the “digital humanities.” While computing had long been used as an approach to humanities topics, the crystallization of a new field called digital humanities around a decade ago and the creation of the Digital Humanities Initiative by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2006 brought new imperatives and incentives for participation in this growing and broadening field. The simplification and wider distribution of digital technologies has likewise made this field accessible to a greater number of researchers. Demand for digital humanities projects and specialization in most universities as well as many grant and fellowship opportunities for such projects have created an environment in which the adjective “digital” has taken on a positive but profoundly vague connotation. In this series of reflections, we would like to outline some of the ways Ottomanists can engage in the digital humanities movement not just as passive consumers of digitized sources and publications but also as active users of digital technologies and new media. The digitization of manuscripts and archival documents allows researchers to approach old sources in new ways. Digital technology also offers novel methods of reading, visualizing, modeling, and mapping historical data. Meanwhile, internet media expand audiences and introduce more flexible and “sensory-rich” platforms for academic production and publication. At the same time, internet communication itself has opened up arenas for rapid and fluid collaboration that is especially well-suited for diverse and disparate topics of study such as the history of the Ottoman Empire. The opportunities presented by these technologies and media in terms of new research methods and platforms as well as different ways of connecting with other areas and fields of study alongside broader internet audiences emphasize the pressing need to update undergraduate and graduate curriculums in order to make students better acquainted with the digital side of the humanities. Nir Shafir: How Digitization Has Transformed Manuscript Research: New Methods for Early Modern Islamic Intellectual History Day after day, the same scene occurs at Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul.  Chris Gratien is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; email: chrisgratien@gmail.com; Michael Polczyński is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University; email: mjp225@georgetown.edu; Nir Shafir is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles; email: nshafir@gmail.com Chris Gratien, Michael Polczyński, and Nir Shafir 38 Tourists, locals and foreigners alike, step into the small, poorly lit room in the old primary school that currently houses twelve computer terminals and a few books on the wall. Having been told that this is the one of the most important manuscript libraries in the world, the visitors start to pull reference books off the shelves and gaze at the strange script or the shiny reproductions of miniatures, all along unaware that the real treasure—the manuscripts—can only be seen on the computers. We scholars might imagine ourselves to be worlds away from these tourists, but we too tend to fetishize the physical text of manuscripts. Faced with a digital proxy we lament the fact that we cannot touch the paper and feel the binding or see the illumination directly. Rather than continue to view the digitization of manuscripts as a deficit, let me argue that digitization actually provides historians a new set of opportunities to ask new questions, discover unknown texts, and gain a different understanding of intellectual and cultural life in the early modern Islamic world in particular. The fundamental change brought about by the mass digitization of a manuscript collection is that it allows a researcher to view ten, twenty, even a hundred manuscripts a day. Compared to digital projects like new visualizations of vast amounts of data or Borgesian attempts at universal libraries, this might not seem like so radical...