You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as “Borders, Property, and Data: A Critical Digital Humanities Approach to the Late Ottoman Borderlands” 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 Approach to the Late Ottoman Borderlands
Speaker: Fatma Öncel, Bahçeşehir University
Abstract:
Digital 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–Greek Border on the Ottoman Property Regime investigates how the 1877–78 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.
Bio:
She is assistant professor of History at Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, and an affiliated researcher at Stanford University’s 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 Boğaziçi University and has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Sabancı University. Her articles have been published in leading journals such as the “Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient”, the “International Review of Social History”, the “Turkish Historical Review”, and “Middle Eastern Studies”. Her article “Land, Tax and Power in the Ottoman Provinces: The Malikane-Mukataa of Esma Sultan in Alasonya (c.1780–1825)” received Brill’s Early Career Paper Prize for its contribution to understanding Ottoman land tenure and provincial power. Her current project, funded by TÜBİTAK for 2025–2028, examines Ottoman–Greek border-making and property transformations in the 1880s. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals ” Turkish Historical Review” (Brill) and “Toplumsal Tarih Akademi”.