Ottoman Nature in Travelogues, 1501–1850: A Digital Analysis

ONiT is an interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project, that systematically collects, processes, and analyzes Ottoman nature (flora, fauna, landscapes) in a large and multilingual corpus of ca. 2,000 travelogues, printed between 1501 and 1850. It started 2022 and will be finished 2025. Historians, Ottomanists, Computer and Library Scientists from the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, the University of Salzburg, the Austrian Institute of Technology, the Austrian National Library (ONB), and the Marmara University in Istanbul jointly analyze digitized collections held by the ONB, supplemented by travelogues held in libraries across the globe. Digital documents, data extracted through computer-aided methods, and new digital tools for qualitative and quantitative exploration created in the project are made publicly available. The project team develops a cutting-edge workflow for the extraction and analysis of texts and images, analyzes the relations of these texts and images by refining text and image analysis methods, and integrates new knowledge into the information systems of the ONB. Assuming that text and image each represent a specific form of coding of information, each code is analyzed and translated into machine readable form by applying and further developing specific state-of- the- art methods building on machine learning/neural networks and transfer learning. ONiT is as the first project to analyze Ottoman nature in a large corpus of travelogues, systematically collects and classifies travelogues images and maps, analyses the relations of travelogues images and texts, and systematically integrates metadata (author, publisher, etc.) on travelogues and their images in the holdings of various libraries into the digital infrastructure of one specific library (ONB). It sheds new light on the transnational environmental history, and the digital tools to be created bear the potential to impact the analysis and digital representation of images, texts and their relations. Main research questions How did travelers construct Ottoman nature? How did this vary between 1501 and 1850? How are the texts and images related to each other? How can these relations be traced semi-automatically and represented in the digital infrastructure of the ONB? Primary researchers involved Univ.-Prof. Dr. Arno Strohmeyer, project leader, historian Dr. Doris Gruber, PI, historian and art historian Ass.-Prof. Dr. Güllü Yildiz, scholar of Islamic history and arts Dr. Rainer Simon, computer scientist Mag. Martin Krickl, data librarian