Istanpolis: Reconstructing Greek Communities in 19th-20th century Istanbul
Christine Philliou, Professor
History
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
This is a collaborative research and Digital Humanities project I initiated in 2020 and our team includes scholars in Greece, Turkey, and several other countries. We are reading Ottoman Turkish and Greek sources about the population of Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and creating data sets, and then visualizations and interactive maps on our website/portal. We meet weekly to discuss progress, workflow, and incubate new projects. Our goal is to understand the many levels of community among Greeks of Istanbul and across that community and the Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish communities of the city.
Role: 1. Website maintenance - we already have a website up and running (Istanpolis.org) but need someone to push content and update. It does not take a high level of expertise and we have the original webmaster still on the project so he can help/train (he has moved on to a higher level of involvement in the data analysis)
2. Locating specific neighborhoods and addresses/locations on a current map of Istanbul, researching the history of particular neighborhoods, buildings, or micro communities in the city, and analyzing data sets we have compiled of Ottoman-era census registers to notice patterns about professions, age, place of origin and place of residence.
3. If there are students familiar with had relevant languages (Modern Greek, Modern Turkish, Ottoman Turkish) we would love help with the research /data sets. This would mean reading Greek and Ottoman census registers (on PDFs) and entering the data into spreadsheets.
4. Social media manager to promote our projects and related events
Qualifications: Basic web design skills required; knowledge of Greek and/or Turkish a plus but not required. Basic knowledge of Google Docs, Google Sheets, databases helpful but we can train. Basic knowledge of where Istanbul is and what it’s importance is in world history is a plus.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Melike Sümertaş, Post-Doc
Hours: to be negotiated
Off-Campus Research Site: Online from anywhere
Related website: http://Istanpolis.org
Arts & Humanities Digital Humanities and Data Science Social Sciences