The project uses the case of  Greek communities of nineteenth-century Istanbul as a pilot case – analyzing the relevant evidence on the basis of historical theory, GIS mapping and simulation modeling, and disseminating the results by using digital humanities methods and tools. We intend to use this grant as seed money to carry out a pilot project, resulting in GIS visualizations to be launched on our website, and an immersive app that will be generated from the datasets. In order to do this, we need to have initial meetings, at Berkeley, and a meeting in Greece to bring together the teams and discuss the process halfway through the two years. While there is a growing field of Digital Humanities for Ottoman studies, the Greek community has not been the subject of such projects. We thus hope to use the Greek case as a pilot to test some of the technologies Apostolos Spanos is developing with his team, and make a unique contribution to the conventional history of the Greek Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire with a new Digital Humanities approach. The resulting apps will be used in teaching to provide students with a new way to experience urban history.

The project has received a start-up funding from Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study.