Ottoman Studies

A hazine or a khazina خزينة is a repository. It is where you put things. Thus, Hazine is an online resource that seeks to function as a repository of writing on repositories. It was started by two Ottoman historians, Nir Shafir and Chris Markiewicz, to provide archives and library guides for researchers working on the Middle East, North Africa, and Islamicate societies. Recognizing that research can be opaque and that the research process itself is often self-taught, Hazine was meant to help acquaint researchers, especially those stepping into the field for the first time, with archives and how to navigate them. Heather Hughes was brought onto the team in 2016 to provide a librarian perspective. Heather invited N.A. Mansour to join the team in 2018. Since ‘relaunching’ in 2018, Hazine has continued to provide the research community with archive reviews, but Hughes and Mansour have since reworked the website to be more broadly inclusive of cultural heritage workers and highlight their contributions to research, while also featuring research techniques that address some of the unique challenges to Islamic and Middle East Studies research. They hope to continue to build the site both as a resource and as an inclusive space where conversations can happen about the research process from all angles.

The Levantine Heritage Foundation is an association which promotes research, preservation and education in the heritage, arts and culture of the communities of the Levant region encompassed by the former Ottoman Empire between the 17th and 20th centuries. The peoples and communities who traded and settled in the area were diverse in origin and faiths, including Venetians, Genoese, Greeks, Turks, Persians, Armenians, Jews, French, Italians, British, many other European and Americans. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, many of the cosmopolitan communities of the Levant region scattered around the globe. The Levantine Heritage Foundation is piecing together these communities’ histories and legacies for future generations to study and build on.

MELCom International tries to achieve its aims in an atmosphere that is both professional and informal. The main focus of activities is the annual conference, which serves as a platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences.

H-Turk, a member of H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences Online. H-Turk is the H-Net/TSA network for Ottoman and Turkish studies.

The OpenOttoman Portal website provides scholars, students and people interested in the Ottoman world with access to resources in Ottoman studies, particularly those from the rapidly expanding digital and digitized universe. The portal provides information and guidance in using digital tools and techniques specifically relevant for research in Ottoman studies, recommendations on best practices from people who use these resources, and examples of research projects using digital and computational methods. The portal also provides links to databases and digital models relevant to work in Ottoman studies, including examples of databases generated specifically from within the field. These and other databases are reviewed to provide additional guidance as to their utility and limitations.

Conducted by members of the Greek section of the Institut de Recherche et d’ Histoire des Textes (IRHT) in Paris (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique-CNRS) in partnership with the Philology Department of the University of Crete, and financed by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR), Projet i-Stamboul (2013-2015) has for its goal retracing the history and realising the virtual reconstruction of the library of the Holy Trinity monastery on the island of Chalki, close to Constantinople. The project moreover foresees the development of and free access to digitalized tools devoted to the manuscripts, as well as the setting-up of the Diktyon portal for the online connection of resources concerning Greek manuscripts

As a first result of the collection and preparation of the data from these rich and untapped historical sources (i.e. travelogues), we will identify and analyze various descriptions of and narratives about the sociopolitical change in the 19th-century Middle East, with a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire. Our initial, yet mostly manual, examination of the random samples from this literature already testifies to the existence of a rich source of information that provides valuable information on various aspects of identity (re)formation in the region and the European travelers’ perceptions of these processes. As a later step, we plan to link the extracted metadata about people, places, publications, and itineraries to other resources such as authority records and wikidata, and make our findings available as machine-readable Linked (Travel) Data. Finally, we aim, through our portal, to provide the scholars and research groups who are interested in the Middle East with an open, rich, and reliable resource for first-hand descriptions and depictions of the various aspects of the socio-political change in the long 19th century.

Discover 1000 Years of Missing History! MuslimHeritage.com is owned, operated and published by The Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (www.FSTC.org.uk), a British organisation based in Manchester, UK.