Critical Approaches to Digital Ottoman Studies: Promises and Challenges

How is doing Ottoman history changing with the digital turn? How do digital tools enable research that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult? What existing research questions do these tools enable us to approach in new ways, and what new research questions do digital methods inspire? How do digital technologies and computational tools facilitate and enhance existing research by making the research process easier? What new organizational forms, ethical concerns, financial challenges and epistemological debates do the digital way of doing history entail?1 This special issue engages these questions by presenting a wide range of research notes and articles in the expanding field of digital Ottoman studies (DOS). We include twenty-one short research notes surveying ongoing projects across a span of digital methodologies, as well as three research articles that explore the possibilities of applying digital methods to various research questions. This overview highlights the promise of ongoing digital projects in Ottoman studies well as some of the challenges. Recent decades have witnessed dizzying developments in digital methods in the humanities and social sciences, transformative for quantitative, spatial, and textual analysis. Beginning with computerized research in the 1960s, digital information technologies have become integrated in historical method to the point that Gerben Zaagsma argued in 2013 that digital history is not an independent or auxiliary field within the discipline of history,