Project Mission
- To create resources that will enable scholars, researchers, decision-makers, and the general public to understand better a critical area of the world and one of the last great multi-ethnic empires.
- To effect radical positive change in the way in which primary resources from the Ottoman Empire are made available to a world-wide public.
- To contribute to a healthier, safer, and more secure world by providing the groundwork for better informed and more thoughtful interactions among nations and peoples.
Rational
- The Ottoman Empire was the last great Eurasian empire of modern times, lasting from the 14th to the early 20th century. It controlled vast territories from North Africa, to the Holy Cities of Islam, into Central Asia in the East and Greece and the Balkans in the West.
- The Ottomans had a profound influence on the structure of life and thought in these areas—areas that are of vital concern to the world today such as Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Albania, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine/Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya.
- We know far too little about the Ottomans and the important residue of their influence in today's world.
Why an Archive? Why Texts?
- Texts are the core, not the whole story. In order to understand Ottoman thought, culture, politics, society we must have access to the things they wrote from tax records to histories, religious tracts, and poems. Specialists reading texts are taking the first step toward creating a broader understanding for everyone.
- Access to important Ottoman texts is severely limited. Unlike the texts of the other familiar powers of early modern times—the Spanish empire, the British, the Hapsburgs, the French—many of the most significant Ottoman texts exist only in manuscript or in rare and defective editions. Imagine thinking that you would like to read one of Shakespeare's plays or Don Quixote and being told that you would need to travel to London or Madrid; then, after waiting 6 months for permission to use the library, you would find that your could only look at a handwritten version of the text for a limited time in a special reading room under the watchful eye of a librarian. This is the situation with many Ottoman texts. It is easy to imagine the obstacles this presents to those wishing to make available to a general public translations of these texts or information about their contexts.
- Resources for analyzing and translating Ottoman texts are lacking. There is no comprehensive historical dictionary of Ottoman Turkish in any language. The most commonly used Ottoman-English dictionary was compiled in the 19th century. Another commonly used dictionary is an Ottoman-Latin dictionary from the 17th century.
- Limited access to texts means limited knowledge. And limited knowledge means less than optimal understanding and decision-making at all levels.
Project Description
What is OTAP?
- OTAP is a cooperative international project employing computer technology and the resources of the World Wide Web to make transcribed Ottoman texts and resources for understanding Ottoman texts broadly accessible to international audiences.
- OTAP is jointly sponsored by the University of Washington in Seattle and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey under the direction of Professor Walter G. Andrews (U.W.) and Professor Mehmed Kalpaklı (Bilkent). The project has been supported by the Center for Advanced Research and Technology in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Washington, the Halil İnalcık Center for Ottoman Studies at Bilkent University, the Institute of Turkish Studies, and the University of Washington Royalty Research Fund. OTAP has an Advisory Board made up of 8 renown international scholars and an outstanding group of 6 experienced technical consultants. Our growing group of participating scholars now numbers over fifty and includes members from the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America.
- The core task of OTAP is the Web publication of transcribed Ottoman texts in searchable, analyzable form but the project also acts as a resource and umbrella for several related projects.
What are the related projects?
- The Ottoman Historical Dictionary (OHD) is an electronic, on-line historical dictionary of the Ottoman language. It is still in the planning stages under the direction of an experienced and highly-regarded lexicographer, Prof. Semih Tezcan of Bamberg University in Germany. The dictionary will use Archive materials and materials collected for Prof. Tezcan's Old Anatolian Turkish project to create a dictionary containing historically accurate definitions supported by examples on the general model of the Oxford English Dictionary. No comparable resource exists for Ottoman Turkish.
- The Bio-bibliographical Database of Ottoman Literature (BIDOL) is an encyclopedia providing information about Ottoman authors and their works. Prof. Gottfried Hagen of the University of Michigan is in the process of developing the database structure for this project, which will encompass and expand upon the metadata core of the Archive. It will eventually provide a unmatched resource for information about knowledge production in the Ottoman Empire.
- The Critical Texts Group headed by Prof. Mustafa İsen of Başkent University in Ankara, Turkey, this group is conducting a survey of Ottoman manuscripts (of which there are approximately 600,000 in Turkish libraries and many thousands in Europe and the U.S.) in order to create a prioritized list of manuscripts to be transcribed and edited for publication in the Archive. No similar list exists today.
What is in the future for OTAP?
In accordance with its mission, OTAP intends to support and encourage the development and growth of informational resources linked to Ottoman texts. Our vision of the near future includes but is not limited to being able to do the following:
- Moving from a text to a detailed statistical analysis of the language of that text or from a word in the text to a dictionary definition and examples of the way that word was used in a particular period.
- Moving from the transcribed text to a digitized manuscript.
- Following links from a name in the text to biographical information about the person named.
- Following hyperlinks from a text to a translation to a scholarly study of the text.
- Following links from a name or topic to a text or texts and from there to both general and detailed information.
The future of OTAP is the future of information technology. We are on the threshold of acquiring an ability to bring disparate sources of data together in radically new forms and, thereby, to accomplish a dramatic change in the way we know our world and ourselves.
