Call for Proposals: Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Special Issue on Digital Ottoman Studies

The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) announces a call for proposals for “Digital Research Notes” on any aspect of Ottoman Studies using digital methods, to be included in a special issue on Digital Ottoman Studies (DOS) in Fall 2022.

Since digital scholarship often advances in an incremental fashion, the special issue will feature recent milestones and current developments in digital Ottoman research. The Digital Research Notes section will be an opportunity for scholars in DOS to showcase salient features of their work for the wider community of scholars of the Ottoman Empire. Examples of fields of digital scholarship featured in the issue may include: creation of text or image corpora, development of language resources, entity recognition, progress in OCR/HTR, digital textual methods (text encoding, digital publishing, topic modeling, stylometry), gazetteer creation, network analysis, GIS, geocoded datasets, 3d modeling/AR/VR, image analysis, advances in technology and cultural heritage (digital GLAM) as well as examples of open scholarship, open source softwares, databases, linked data, crowdsourcing and digital community building.

 The Digital Research Notes will consist of 1000-1500-word narratives and 1-2 images.  Research Notes should include the following elements:

 -a brief framing of the context of the research for a general, non-technical audience of Ottoman scholars

-the context of the research (either independent or as part of an established digital project)

– a clear statement of a significant milestone or current development

-research questions raised

-sources (print or archival) used

-general statement on methods or workflows employed to attain this result

-a statement on how this research milestone may contribute to the larger field of Ottoman Studies, digital and non-digital

-1-2 visualizations

-a stable link to any data referenced (optional)

Proposals for a research note should include a title, the name(s) of contributors, and a 150-200-word summary touching on each of the elements listed above. In the interest of diversity of digital Ottoman scholarship being represented in the issue, in the case of significant overlap of proposals, the editors of this section may ask for multiple authors to pool their efforts in the final step. The deadline for proposals is December 1, 2021 and the deadline for submission of research notes to an internal review committee will be February 15, 2022.  Please submit your proposals and direct any inquiries to [email protected].