Digital Humanities and Ottoman Studies Workshop

Workshop:

Digital Humanities and Ottoman Studies
State of the art, challenges, perspectives and prospective research

7-9 July 2022, University of Vienna

The workshop will be held without audience but participation via Zoom is possible. Please click here to register.

The Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of Vienna is hosting the international workshop “Digital humanities and Ottoman studies. State of the art, challenges, perspectives and prospective research”. The workshop is organised by the Chair of Turkish and Ottoman Studies at the University of Vienna and computer scientists from the Computer Science Department, (Research Group "Computerphilology") at the University of Hamburg who are currently working together on advanced digital humanities (DH) methods to be applied in Ottoman studies. The workshop organisers are members of the Mixed Methods project HerCoRe – Hermeneutic and Computer‐based Analysis of Reliability, Consistency and Vagueness in Historical Texts (https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/inst/dmp/hercore/projects.html). The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH‐CH) is the major collaborating partner for the workshop. The workshop is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within its ‘Mixed Methods’ in theHumanities program. In recent years, the number of initiatives and projects that use digital methods and techniques has been increasing. However, given the area and period of time covered by the Ottoman Empire, the usage of digital methods faces particular challenges in Ottoman studies (a multitude of scripts, languages, cultural identities, diverse historical periods). The “Digital humanities and Ottoman studies” workshop brings together more than 40 researchers from the fields of Ottoman studies, computer science and digital humanities based in Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey and the US. The participants will discuss the potentials and challenges of digital Ottoman research. The workshop addresses these challenges and covers a variety of topical issues in the DH:

• Digitisation and palaeography

• Digital editions

• Language technology, text mining, text analysis

• Ontology / knowledge representation

• Vagueness and uncertainty

• Annotation / search

• Data modelling, data encoding, standards

• Visualisation; other media: 3D, GIS

• Infrastructures; metadata

The workshop will examine particularities, challenges and advances in computational methods that can be applied to Ottoman data. At the same time, it will pay attention to the role of traditional hermeneutic methods in a digital environment.

For the first time on this scale, computer scientists, DH experts and scholars of Ottoman studies will be brought together. Therefore, this workshop aims at providing a basis for future initiatives that will help to strengthen and develop mixed methods in digital Ottoman studies. Furthermore, the workshop looks at possible ways to integrate DH into teaching as part of Ottoman studies programmes.

Conveners ‐ Organizers

The organizers of this workshop are members of the core team of the HerCoRe – Hermeneutic and Computer‐based Analysis of Reliability, Consistency and Vagueness in Historical Texts – project (https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/inst/dmp/hercore/projects.html).

Alptuğ Güney, University of Hamburg (Ottoman Studies), HerCoRe – research group “Computerphilology”, PhD candidate in Ottoman Studies, University of Vienna

Cristina Vertan, University of Hamburg (Computer Science, computational linguistics), principal Investigator HerCoRe project

Walther von Hahn, University of Hamburg, HerCoRe project – Steering Committee Member (Computer Science, Computational linguistics, Digital Humanities)

Yavuz Köse, University of Vienna (Chair of Ottoman and Turkish Studies), HerCoRe project – Steering Committee Member

Previous events:

One-Day Workshop:

HTRising Ottoman Manuscripts
February 12, 2021

The one-day workshop aims to discuss the possibilities of automatic text recognition for Ottoman
manuscripts. The workshop intends to present first findings of working with the software platform
Transkribus (transkribus.eu) and further discuss potentials and challenges of digital Ottoman research.

This is a closed event and a limited number of audience will be allowed. To register, please send an email including your name and affiliation to Aysu Akcan at: aysu.akcan@univie.ac.at

Please click here for details.