You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as \u201cBorders, Property, and Data: A Critical Digital Humanities Approach to the Late Ottoman Borderlands\u201d organized by the Department of History.<\/p>\n
Date: 13 November 2025, Thursday
\nTime: 16.30
\nVenue: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room<\/p>\n
Title: Borders, Property, and Data: A Critical Digital Humanities Approach to the Late Ottoman Borderlands<\/p>\n
Speaker: Fatma \u00d6ncel, Bah\u00e7e\u015fehir University<\/p>\n
Abstract:
\nDigital humanities offers historians new ways to organize, analyze, and visualize sources, yet its critical use begins with questioning how digital processes shape historical understanding. This approach examines how archival materials become data and how choices in classification or transcription visualization reproduce hierarchies of knowledge. Borders and Property: A Digital Analysis of the Impact of the Ottoman\u2013Greek Border on the Ottoman Property Regime investigates how the 1877\u201378 War and subsequent border demarcation redefined land ownership and social relations in Thessaly and Epirus. Moving beyond diplomatic history, it traces property struggles involving Ottoman officials, financiers, peasants, and refugees. Methodologically, the project combines close reading of Ottoman manuscripts with semi-digital processing of English and French sources and a deep-learning pipeline for Greek materials, guided by a digital ethics framework emphasizing transparency and provenance. The resulting database supports network and spatial analyses that reveal new dimensions of legal and economic transformation in the late Ottoman borderlands.<\/p>\n
Bio:
\nShe is assistant professor of History at Bah\u00e7e\u015fehir University, Istanbul, and an affiliated researcher at Stanford University\u2019s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Her work explores Ottoman social and economic history with a focus on rural society, land, taxation, and property regimes, as well as the integration of digital humanities into historical research. She received her Ph.D. in History from Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University and has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Sabanc\u0131 University. Her articles have been published in leading journals such as the \u201cJournal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient\u201d, the \u201cInternational Review of Social History\u201d, the \u201cTurkish Historical Review\u201d, and \u201cMiddle Eastern Studies\u201d. Her article \u201cLand, Tax and Power in the Ottoman Provinces: The Malikane-Mukataa of Esma Sultan in Alasonya (c.1780\u20131825)\u201d received Brill\u2019s Early Career Paper Prize for its contribution to understanding Ottoman land tenure and provincial power. Her current project, funded by T\u00dcB\u0130TAK for 2025\u20132028, examines Ottoman\u2013Greek border-making and property transformations in the 1880s. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals \u201d Turkish Historical Review\u201d (Brill) and \u201cToplumsal Tarih Akademi\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as \u201cBorders, Property, and Data: A Critical Digital Humanities Approach to the Late Ottoman Borderlands\u201d organized by the Department of History. Date: 13 November 2025, Thursday Time: 16.30 Venue: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room Title: Borders, Property, and Data: A Critical Digital Humanities [\u2026] <\/p>\n