The Foundations of Charting the Ottoman Empire
The foundations of Charting the Ottoman Empire were laid through two interconnected projects that began in 2015 and 2016. The first project, led by Ali Yaycıoğlu, Antonis Hadjikyriacou, Erik Steiner, and Fatma Öncel, focused on the Ali Pasha Archive and initiated the Mapping Ottoman Epirus (MapOE) project. Supported by Stanford’s Data Science Initiative, CESTA, the Gennadius Library, and the National Hellenic Research Foundation, this initiative aimed to digitally map the historical landscapes of Epirus during the administration of Ali Pasha. Over time, the project expanded to include documents from the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, leading to the development of:
- Text extraction scripts for Ottoman documents
- Digital maps of Epirus’s topography
- Network visualizations
- A historical gazetteer of place names
MapOE research produced multiple outputs, including a structured website: https://mapoe.stanford.edu, datasets, and academic publications.
At the same time, a second project, launched by Yaycıoğlu in collaboration with Fikret Yılmaz, Nicole Coleman, and Erik Steiner, focused on Ottoman fiscal documents. Originally developed to support Yaycıoğlu’s book project, Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire, this research involved extensive transliterations of two major fiscal codices (MAD9748 and MAD9726). The latter posed particular challenges due to its shorthand notations and complex paratextual elements.
By 2022, data scientist Ezgi Çolakoğlu joined the team to build a relational database, and Fatma Öncel contributed to fiscal data modeling.
Meanwhile, a third project was initiated: Decoding Ilm-i Siyaqat: Unlocking Ottoman Economic Mind Through Neural Networks, led by Yaycıoğlu, Coleman, Leonardo Impett, and Steiner in 2020. This AI-driven project employed self-supervised learning to segment and analyze different handwritten elements in MAD9726, shedding light on Ottoman record-keeping practices.
The impact of these projects extended beyond technical research. In 2022, Yaycıoğlu and Nora Barakat co-edited a special issue, Approaches in Critical Digital Ottoman Studies, in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, highlighting innovations in digital Ottoman scholarship. They also co-founded the Ottoman and Middle Eastern Digital Lab at CESTA to further digital research in these fields.
A major milestone was reached in 2022, when projects on fiscal codices, probate inventories, and debt registers were integrated with Mapping Ottoman Epirus, following the discovery of new material related to Ali Pasha’s postmortem settlements. Around the same time, Yılmaz and Öncel completed a large-scale archival search in Istanbul, extracting a comprehensive corpus of probate inventories and debt registers.
Since 2023, a growing team—including Yaycıoğlu, Öncel, Çolakoğlu, Jordan Rothkowitz, and Osman Onur Genç (joining in 2024)—has focused on data modeling, relational database development, and network visualizations for MAD9726. These efforts were showcased at major international conferences in 2024, including those organized by the Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes (CIEPO) and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), with findings published in the Poster Session and DH2024 Book of Abstracts. The research team also presented these developments at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial Analysis (CESTA) seminars, further engaging with scholars in digital humanities and Ottoman studies.
