OTAP News: Number 11 - October 2003

Subject: Ottoman texts archive project & ottoman historical dictionary
University of Washington & Bilkent University
OTAP

Dear Colleague,

It has been some time since the last Newsletter but, despite the rejection of our proposal for funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ottoman Texts Archive and the Ottoman Historical Dictionary Project continue to be active. Our addition of texts to the archive has been slowed somewhat because we now lack support staff at the University of Washington end and because we need to spend time looking for funding sources. But we have no intention of going out of business! And there is much happening:

• This summer, Prof. Mehmet Kalpaklı, co-director of the project from Bilkent University, spent two months in Seattle. This enabled us to plan for the future and to institute better coordination of our programs. Bilkent assistants will continue to prepare texts for the archive and will participate more fully in the process of tagging the texts for format and informational content. We will also be bringing Bilkent students to the University of Washington as exchange students to be trained in the technology of the Projects.
• Prof. Kalpaklı and Prof. Semih Tezcan (of Bamberg University) have been consulting about the Historical Dictionary and are leaning toward an initial pilot project of constructing a dictionary of rare or unusual words and meanings. [Take a look at our model dictionary produced by a team of UW Information School undergraduates. It is on the website.]
• At the UW we are expanding the research and development aspect of the Archive Project by exploring the use of Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-compatible tagging to accurately represent the fine details of original manuscripts. We are also looking into obtaining and developing tools for extracting and analyzing data from Archive texts and are assembling a team of students to develop models for the representation and analysis of Ottoman manuscripts. Look for a report on this in the future. If there is anyone out there who might have a research interest in a combination of computer technology, Ottoman textual studies, and the statistical analysis of language, we would love to hear from you.
• Recently we made a presentation of our projects as part of an outside speaker series put on by Microsoft on their campus in Redmond, Washington.