Project Description

This project will present the electronic version of a 17th century Ottoman manuscript which is registered under the number Y-599-1 in Yapi Kredi Research Library, Istanbul, Turkey.

The idea of this project has been inspired by the Ottoman Text and Archive Project (OTAP), an innovative project that aims to build an internet-based Ottoman text archive in the long term. The present project is thus being undertaken with Walter Andrews, the head of OTAP, and Stacy Waters, who has developed a system of converting Ottoman texts for display on the internet.

I started to work on this Ottoman manuscript during my second year in the Ottoman Studies Masters Program at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. As part of my MA thesis, I had then transcribed the manuscript, subjected it to a literary analysis and discussed the findings. The present e-project thus builds heavily upon my previous "paper work experience" with the manuscript. I have already completed the preliminaries of such an e-project during the previous academic year. Under the guidance of Walter Andrews and Stacy Waters, I worked on the XML tagging scheme to make the text useful for other purposes including automated text analysis. Hence, the project thus far has focused on the XML tagging process of the manuscript and the character set in scripting issues. The present project, as a follow-up of the previous work, aims to continue with the study of the XML tagged manuscript. As stated in the work plan below, the central issues will be the converting of the XML tagged text into an HTML text via the Stream Editor (SED) and the configuration of the footnotes of the transcribed text. The final end of the project is to make the text displayable on the internet and thus contribute to the Ottoman textual studies by providing the scholars with the easily accessible electronic version of an Ottoman literary text.