141037 UE M10 Digital Humanities und Osmanistik (2025S)

This course aims to equip students with the foundational skills and conceptual tools necessary to engage with Ottoman Turkish texts through digital methods. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand the scholarly concept of digital text editions and analysis in Ottoman Studies, and prepare basic digital editions enriched with annotations and structured data. Furthermore, students will be encouraged to formulate analytical questions and explore digital tools to critically interrogate textual content.

- Students will examine existing digital platforms like Keshif, Mecmua Project, and QhoD. These platforms provide access to a variety of Ottoman texts, including micro-editions, miscellanies, and diplomatic documents, literary and historical texts offering students the opportunity to analyze and interpret these texts within a digital framework.

- Methods of producing a digital edition, including writing brief explanatory notes, tagging named entities or thematic markers, with a focus on the logic of TEI/XML encoding.

- Introduction to digital tools such as Baserow and Noadgoat for working with structured textual data and performing digital text analysis. Students will learn how to extract key information from texts (e.g., names, places, references), organize this information in the form of structured datasets, and use digital platforms to visualize and query the relationships among different elements in the text. Through this process, students will be introduced to the basics of relational thinking, semantic structuring, and pattern recognition in textual data. These tools allow students to go beyond reading and transcribing by enabling them to ask and investigate questions such as: Who/What is mentioned most often? What kinds of people or places are associated with each other? How do themes evolve across a work?

The course combines lectures, hands-on practices, and guided project work. Students will work with selected Ottoman texts from open-access digital edition platforms. Each session will blend theoretical background with practical activities, including XML tagging, and database building. Digital tools such as TEI editors, Baserow, and Noadgoat will be introduced gradually. Students will be guided to develop their own small-scale digital edition and analysis project, using the skills and methods learned throughout the course.