Doing History Digitally: Perspectives from the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East Field

AHA Session 249
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Murray Hill East (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Ali Yaycıoğlu, Stanford University
Panel:
Nora Barakat, Stanford University
Mustafa Emre Gunaydi, Stanford University
Tyler Kynn, Central Connecticut State University
Merve Tekgurler, Stanford University

Session Abstract

With the development of technologies that process a wider array of languages and the increase in techniques to study multilingual textual and material artefacts, digital methods and computational approaches are finding more and more resonance within fields of History that work primarily with non-English sources. Ottoman Empire and the Middle East (OEME) is one such field where scholars are using, adapting, and developing tools and conducting digital research that not only builds upon the existing English language scholarship but also challenges it in crucial ways. In Fall 2022, The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, devoted an entire special dossier on Digital Ottoman Studies.

This roundtable "Doing History Digitally: Perspectives from the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East Field,” proposes to bring the research contributions of OEME field to the broader community of historians. Technology is not language agnostic. Methods of Digital History developed for and through English language research fail to capture the nuances necessary to do history digitally in the rest of the historical profession. Moreover, the emphasis on English creates a false impression that these approaches and applications are only to be used for English language scholarship. This impression is unfortunately all too common in the experiences of the roundtable participants. More importantly, it is detrimental to the future of the fields and the historical profession. Historians have valuable expertise and important criticisms that can shape the future of Humanities and Social Sciences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The strength of Digital History is, in no small part, in showing that there are critical and nuanced ways of dealing with computation, data, bias, and societal impact. This also means that the field has to be self-critical. It is time to address the field’s bias towards the English language.

This roundtable invites scholars, both Ph.D. students and early career academics, to provide a broad array of perspectives on the possible futures of Digital History. Focusing specifically on OEME, this roundtable highlights a variety of themes such as GIS and spatial studies, network and text analysis, gaming and historical simulations, digital platforms, and 3D visualizations, with an emphasis on the particular challenges faced by scholars of this region’s languages. The main motivation is to create a collegiate discussion environment engaging with what it means to be doing history digitally broadly for the historical profession but crucially starting from the perspectives of those who work in multilingual, low-resource settings. Hence, this roundtable aims to set an agenda for the current situation and recent developments, including the use of AI technologies, in the field of Digital History broadly.

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