- 1 “Histoires, espaces et patrimoines pendant la transition de l’Empire ottoman à l’État grec”: https (...)
- 2 We would like to thank Panagiotis C. Poulos, Eleni Kallimopoulou and Kostis Kornetis for all the i (...)
1This article presents the objectives, challenges met, and methodologies used in a series of digital humanities pilot projects and resources for research and pedagogy that engage with different aspects of the Greek Ottoman past, and that were developed as part of the “Histories, Spaces and Heritages at the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State”1 (HSH thereafter) research project with funding from the French School at Athens. We discuss these digital projects as part of the larger collaborative initiative of the interdisciplinary HSH research network2 but also in the broader context of addressing research gaps, methodological problems and pathways for collaboration in digital humanities approaches to the Greek Ottoman, post-Ottoman and contemporary past.
2In the first section of the article we introduce, and briefly discuss, the digital pilot applications and resources initially developed within HSH: a) an online bibliography of Greek Ottoman monuments, b) “Ottoman Heritage in Greece: Map and Bibliography”, a web mapping application that connects the bibliography of Ottoman sites and monuments to an interactive map of sites, c) “ASÂR‑I ATIKA”: a timeline application tracing linguistic, conceptual, and administrative changes in how “monuments” are perceived and managed at the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state and d) “Senseflows”, a case study of a digital archive highlighting sensorial qualities and urban “flows” in Thessaloniki at the transition to the Greek state. We then discuss “Senseflows” in more detail, focusing on the methodological and epistemological challenges involved in working with diverse, multilingual sources, archival items and media in a digital environment. Finally, we outline some future steps and pathways for collaboration at the intersection of Ottoman and Modern Greek studies and the Digital Humanities.
3Our discussion of the projects presented here is largely based on our experience and involvement in the HSH project during the period 2017–2019. We were involved, as a small digital humanities unit, in providing training, support and consultation in digital methods and in the design, development and maintenance of digital outputs and resources. We participated in, and greatly benefited from, discussions about the diverse nature of archival sources and we developed, in close collaboration with other research team members, “Senseflows” a “proof-of-concept” pilot application using archival sources and materials. “Senseflows” as a pilot project, as well as all of the other projects featured in and hosted by the HSH network, aims to create a welcoming platform for interdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration, and experimentation that can expand towards different digital humanities applications (e.g., network analysis, GIS, 3D, Virtual and Augmented Reality). Our objective, through our contribution to the project, was to methodologically enrich and support the interdisciplinary team in order to create a first set of pilot applications, collections and seed content for research and pedagogy that can provide a basis for follow-up projects and initiatives. Based on the scope of the HSH initiative at this stage, the main goal was to identify necessary tasks and challenges and foresee future steps in treating collections and archival materials of different types and formats as data. We focused on identifying new ways of thinking about data fields, categories, and structures and on using existing, accessible digital humanities tools to showcase new conceptual and methodological perspectives rather than developing new, advanced, and technologically innovative tools. We anticipate, however, that the groundwork in terms of documenting resources and in identifying data types, their qualities and interconnections, as well as conceptual categories to represent them, will support new innovative applications and follow‑up projects in different directions some of which are described in section 4 of this chapter.
4By using the term “transition” we refer not only to the major political and administrative changes and population shifts that marked the expansion of the Greek state into the former Ottoman territories in the first half of the 20th century, but also, in a broader context, to the surviving legacies of these shifts and the ways in which they are still understood, documented, and “mapped” today. The term is meant to describe a sense of mobility―literally in the case of the Greek-Turkish population exchange―or, more broadly, of transformation of cities, monuments, neighbourhoods through enduring materialities and archival traces: the relocation of a pulpit from Thessaloniki to Istanbul, the conversion of a mosque to a church, the replacement of multilingual documents, archives, and sources by Greek as the official and exclusive language of the state’s administrative services and institutions. The HSH project comes to add another layer of transition to these texts, sites, and resources: one of digital transformation, remediation and interpretation. This is also a transition, from analogue to digital, from archival item to publicly accessible data, that highlights what is often a dual challenge in digital humanities. Digital humanities projects often invest great time and effort in trying to establish date formats and chronologies for historical periods defined by great transformations or in defining acceptable terms, vocabularies or descriptive fields that can be used in digital tools, while, at the same time, digital humanities scholars need to be self-reflexively aware of the transformations or distortions they perform through their own use of data types and categories and through their choice of tools.
- 3 Berry, Fagerjord 2017, p. 1.
5“Histories, Spaces and Heritages” studies historical trajectories of urban space at the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Greek State. In doing so, it looks at changes of use and function, transformations, legacies and sensorial dimensions of certain spatial units on the scale of sites and buildings, neighbourhoods and urban areas. In its cross-disciplinary and multi-modal approach, the project raises some key questions and challenges that can be addressed and further advanced through digital humanities work. Digital Humanities (DH) is often used as an umbrella term to describe a growing community of practice as well as an interdisciplinary set of methodologies and practices toward the application of computational tools and methods to humanities research and pedagogy3.
6Over the last decade, Digital Humanities projects and initiatives have been increasingly visible and active in the field of Ottoman and post-Ottoman studies, mainly through research infrastructure projects in the form of dedicated databases, gazetteers and bibliographies (e.g., “Digital Archive of Ottoman Periodicals”,4 “The Online Bibliography of Ottoman-Turkish Literature”,5 “Database of Ottoman Inscriptions”,6 “Historiography of Early Modern Ottoman Europe”7) as well as through networks and collaborative initiatives (“Open Ottoman”8, “Digital Ottoman Studies”9). In recent years, numerous digital humanities projects have populated the field, by developing or using source materials and datasets related to the Ottoman world, addressing challenges related to the multilingualism of the sources as well as their geographic dispersion.10 Not surprisingly, given that digital humanities has traditionally been a largely text-analysis dominated field, there is a significant interest for digital projects based on textual Ottoman resources such as digital editions (e.g., “Mecmua Online”11) and character recognition initiatives for printed and handwritten historical documents.12 Digital mapping and spatial analysis projects of the Ottoman world are another area of research interest in the field, featuring Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications and visualisation approaches (e.g., “Mapping Ottoman Epirus: Region, Power and Empire”13, “Visual Hasluck: Mapping Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean”14, “Mediterranean Insularities: Space, Landscape and Agriculture in Early Modern Cyprus and Crete”15). Our digital humanities work within HSH benefits heavily from such digital endeavours in the field of Ottoman studies while also drawing, in its analytical and methodological approach, from the fields of sensory history, heritage and material culture studies.16
- 17 Argenti (ed.) 2017.
- 18 Albera et al. 2017.
7We should also note the recently increased interest in engaging with the Ottoman geographies, materialities and legacies of modern Greece, not just in terms of scholarly publications17 but also in the fields of public humanities as well as museum and heritage-based education.18 Considering that many of these efforts address certain gaps, erasures or underexplored aspects of Greece’s recent past, we position our work in dialogue with such projects aiming to facilitate an inclusive space for further collaboration.
8We employed a digital humanities methodological approach in studying the post-Ottoman transition in Greece, especially through the transformation of urban space and its sensorial traces, aiming, partly, to challenge some traditional concepts, practices and assumptions about historical sources, archival items and their documentation, (re)use and representation. From the start, we committed to embedding digital technologies in our interdisciplinary team’s workflow, and our collaboration and outreach strategy. This choice is also in line with the overall approach of the project, aimed at the intersection of scholarly work, education, and public outreach. The HSH Researchers’ Network brings together scholars, researchers, postgraduate students and practitioners that share an interest in the Greek Ottoman and post-Ottoman past. The network has a robust outreach strategy with a focus on direct user engagement, “in‑situ” and “hands‑on” experiences as well as on the use of digital platforms19 to communicate project results and encourage the engagement of users as co‑creators and curators that can explore, enrich, and interrogate the project’s knowledge outputs.
9The project holds a strong commitment to open access, open data and open-source software in relation to research tools, software, methods, and final outputs. It aims to contribute to the promotion of openness, transparency and the sharing and reuse of data and resources. Such a commitment also specifically serves the project’s objectives and aspirations in creating an international, multilingual and cross-disciplinary network of scholars exploring aspects of shared traditions and legacies across the limits of the former Ottoman Empire, and still define, to a large extent, contemporary memory and identity politics. Using the project’s digital outputs as a proof-of-concept, we aim to develop an online platform for researchers working across languages, disciplines, data types, archives and institutional environments and to build a roadmap for future projects and collaboration.
- 20 The “Otheritages” Zotero online bibliography was designed by Samia Samara and Anna-Maria Sichani a (...)
10One of the first central digital components that was created is an online bibliography of Greek Ottoman monuments. The database, named “Otheritages”, is an open-access bibliography composed of more than 1800 multilingual bibliographic entries using Zotero, an openly available bibliographic management system, originally developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, now supported through the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. The entries are enhanced with descriptive tags and are further organised by monument types and by region.20 The online bibliography is originally conceived as a collaborative work-in-progress: members of the Researchers’ Network are regularly invited to contribute bibliographic suggestions and additions in order to make the database as inclusive as possible. The bibliography is meant for the internal use and documentation of the sources available as part of the HSH projects but also as a standalone contribution to the broader Ottoman history.
11The “Otheritages” online bibliography provided the basis for another digital output: “Ottoman Heritage in Greece: Map and Bibliography”. “Ottoman Heritage in Greece” is an openly accessible web-based mapping application that connects the bibliography of Ottoman sites and monuments to an interactive map. The map was developed using the open-source location intelligence and web mapping platform Carto that supports web-based rendering, geospatial analysis and visualization of different types of datasets. On the “Ottoman Heritage in Greece” applications, users can dynamically visualise about 600 monuments and 1 600 bibliographical entries on a map based on their type. Each georeferenced site is linked to related bibliographic entries (fig. 1).21
Fig. 1. A view of a fountain entry in “Ottoman Heritage in Greece: Map and Bibliography”.
- 22 For a recent discussion of contested concepts of the Ottoman heritage in Epirus, see (Moudopoulos- (...)
- 23 The “ASÂR‑I ATIKA” application can be accessed at:
12Another digital interactive resource that was developed as part of the HSH project is “ASÂR‑I ATIKA”: an interactive, web-based timeline tracing linguistic, conceptual, and administrative shifts in the ways in which monuments are perceived and managed at the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state.22 The timeline focuses on the region of Epirus and covers the 19th and early 20th century. It was developed using TimelineJS, an open-source tool for building media-rich timelines created by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University.23 TimelineJS uses a user-friendly workflow by dynamically visualising the data inserted by the user in a predefined spreadsheet template. The case study focuses geographically on Ioannina and Epirus using written archival sources related to monuments of that region, mainly “salname”, Ottoman administrative yearbooks or travellers’ narratives. Through these textual resources, users can trace changes in what was conceived as a monument during the late Ottoman period compared to what was considered to be a monument, and preserved as such, following the administrative integration of the region in the Greek State. This application stands as a multidimensional text, offering users a chance to view the history of a concept through a visual narrative based on primary sources (fig. 2). In other words, ASÂR‑I ATIKA offers a methodological and technological framework to digitally explore trajectories of concepts about history, memory, and heritage as represented in archival sources. The expandability and availability of this framework as an open-source tool make it a great candidate for testing and developing more case studies and applications using Ottoman sources for research and educational purposes.
Fig. 2. “ASÂR-I ATIKA” application.
13Finally, the last digital humanities resource developed in the context of the HSH project is “Senseflows: sensorial flows in Salonica at the transition from the Ottoman empire to the Greek State”, a case study of a digital archive highlighting sensorial qualities, transitions and mobilities of objects and people in Thessaloniki’s urban environment in the 1913–1923 period. “Senseflows”, is a pilot application for research and pedagogy that aims to function both as a digital sensorial archive and an interactive, multisensory map of three historic districts in Thessaloniki’s city centre, that will allow users to explore intercommunal experiences, relocations and “flows” in urban space, during the city’s critical transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State. In the following section, we describe the “Senseflows” project in more detail and discuss its analytical and methodological perspectives.
14“Senseflows: Sensorial Flows in Salonica at the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State” (thereafter “Senseflows”) was developed with a twofold objective. On one hand, it aims to provide an open, accessible, and innovative digital scholarly resource on Thessaloniki’s historic urban environment using less-known archival material and recent research outputs. At the same time, it offers a “proof-of-concept” towards a more systematic and advanced digital and methodological toolkit that can support the integration of diverse media, sources, and multilingual datasets and accommodate different research and pedagogy needs by opening up previously under-explored content to a whole new set of capabilities for engagement. We focused on identifying new ways of “seeing”, structuring, and handling this archival content as data and we prioritized this process as critical, foundational work before any new tools or technologies are developed. Rather than focusing on technological innovation, we invested our efforts in thinking about the archival sources and materials and their corresponding data categories and connections through terms and concepts that address their entanglements and trajectories, textures, materialities, and sensorial qualities. This was also a process of self-reflexive thinking, in terms of the potential omissions and distortions, often encountered in digital humanities projects, as multidimensional, sensorial archival objects and sources are transformed into or treated as “machine-readable “data.
- 24 Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2017; Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2020.
- 25 Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2020.
- 26 For a theoretical discussion of “sensorial flows” as an analytical concept see Kallimopoulou, Korn (...)
15Both in terms of our analytical and methodological perspective and in relation to the spatio-temporal framework of Thessaloniki as a case study, our starting point was a series of concepts and methodologies originally developed by Eleni Kallimopoulou, Kostis Kornetis, and Panagiotis C. Poulos, members of the “Histories, Spaces, Heritages” research team.24 Through the HSH project and the cross-disciplinary discussions of the research team, we were able to build on, extend, and “translate” these concepts and methodologies into the process of building the framework for a digital, multimodal archive. A central analytical concept that was used in the project was that of “sensorial flows”.25 “Sensorial flows” is a term used to describe the sensorial assemblages of communities, buildings, or objects, in their multisensorial qualities (e.g., tactile, acoustic), and in their capacity to function as indicators of major shifts and transformations in experiencing an urban historic environment, as for example, the altered soundscapes of a city.26
- 27 Mazower 2007; Naar 2016; Epameinondas 2017; Kallimopoulou, Poulos 2014; Albera et al. 2017; Kairidi (...)
- 28 See, for example, Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2020 for a discussion of the use of Yeni Cami in (...)
- 29 Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2018, p. 34.
16The case of the historical urban environment of Thessaloniki in the first quarter of the 20th century, and especially during the period that spanned from 1912 to 1923, is certainly one of such major shifts and transformations. The dramatic shifts and major transitions that reshaped Thessaloniki’s multidimensional urban and social fabric, marked by the administrative integration to the Greek state, the great fire of 1917, and the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange have been well documented and are part of recent analyses and interventions in the scholarly and public discourse.27 In the context of this project we focused on how such transformations could be mapped, documented, and represented, especially in terms of their material and sensorial dimensions. Attempting to digitally document a city in flux is already a challenging task, especially considering that, during this period, the long established ethno-religious distinctions, daily life and economic patterns of the city were dramatically destabilized. What adds to the challenge is the fact that these transformations are also about silences and erasures in the archives, official narratives and the actual historic urban environment.28 The 1917 fire was one of the dramatic events that caused these erasures. As pointed out by Kallimopoulou et al. “the political reconfiguration and reconstruction of the city that followed the fire of 1917 sealed its transition to modernity and the silencing of the Muslim and Jewish communities in public space, the culmination of which would come with the influx of refugees from Asia Minor in 1923”.29
17These urban erasures or archival silences have been part of our research process. When, for example, we were thinking about the notion of an archival item and its digital surrogates, we constantly had to address certain gaps and acknowledge the fragmented, dispersed nature of such items and sources. The fragmented nature of archival materials combined with the spatio-temporal density and fluidity of the 1913–1923 historical context forced us to reflect on questions that had to do with the ways in which we could turn terms, dates, and categories to “machine-readable” data that we could use for a digital humanities project, but also, on a more fundamental level, on our overall approach in compiling, or re‑assembling heterogeneous sources and media to build an urban sensorial archive.
- 30 Altschuler, Weimer 2020; Sá Pereira 2019; Forlini, Hinrichs, Brosz 2018.
- 31 Papadopoulos et al. 2019; Eve 2017; Murphy et al. 2017.
- 32 Hamilakis 2013, p. 126.
- 33 The HSH project and research network aims to explore the wide range of possibilities offered by th (...)
18Expanding on the notion of “sensorial flows”, we chose to centre site conversions, relocations of people or artifacts or “flows” of objects, as the events to be documented through the archival material and represented in the digital archive. This approach also reflects recent calls in the digital humanities field―largely dominated by text-based or visual analyses―for sensorial, mixed methodological and multimodal approaches in digital humanities.30 The challenge of representing a multisensorial archive and its interrelations through an oculocentric and thus sensorially-limited digital environment was, right from the outset, a defining parameter of our work. The gaps and possibilities in designing, immersive, multisensorial (tactile, auditory, olfactory) environments and applications, are well documented, especially in the fields of archaeology, cultural heritage, and the digital humanities, and recent projects have dealt with these issues taking advantage of technological developments.31 Given the limitations in fully representing sensorial qualities per se in a digital, mediated environment, we focused on highlighting archival items as sensorial assemblages and documenting their material traces and relationships. We really thought about the different material qualities, textures, or sensorial “imprints” of the items we documented and the relations or interactions between them. Instead of prioritizing certain forms of media or archival materials, we looked for the sensorial qualities and experiences captured in the sources such as, for example, the sounds of prayers in a mosque or a church bell described in a memoir or the tactile textures of the decorative patterns and materials on a “minber” as shown on a historic photograph. Following this approach, we also focused not on singular items but rather on congregations of archival items that can conjure up certain memories, sensorial experiences, or as Yannis Hamilakis has pointed out “the contingent co‑presence of heterogeneous elements such as bodies, things, substances, affects, memories, information, and ideas”.32 Quite often, it is through such a co‑presence of different elements that we needed to establish or attempt to capture visual, tactile or aural dimensions of objects, spaces or social practices. We often also had to indirectly trace and associate sensorial qualities of spaces such as the interior of a mosque using descriptions of sounds and other sensorial experiences in historic documents. Considering that historical media (e.g., film reels, audio recordings) of such urban spaces while being actively used by different communities are rarely preserved, their sensorial qualities need to be indirectly established from a wide range of sources and archival fragments or re‑created as part of technology-enabled immersive experiences.33
- 34 The spatial units were decided in close collaboration with the HSH research team and building on p (...)
19In terms of the spatial scale in the urban environment, we focused on three neighborhoods of Salonica, two neighborhoods in the city center and a newly founded district on the outskirts, all three reflecting the major shift of the 1913-1923 period in interesting ways:34
- the Hamza Bey (Tahtakale)
- the Saint Athanasios area
- the Hamidiye district
20Focusing on these three urban clusters the HSH research team defined some key questions:
- What subjects and/or objects move (or stay behind) and what are their itineraries?
- What kind of affective experiences have these movements produced?
- How can these affective experiences, and the sensorial assemblages associated with them, be documented and represented?
21As a means of codifying these research questions, we used a tripartite conceptual scheme of “textures, transfers, and transitions”. This scheme aims to describe shifts both in the actual site or object of research (e.g., a mosque, a public square, a pulpit) as well as in the modalities of research and knowledge production (e.g., archival research, fieldwork, digital mapping and documentation) and describes the materials and the processes identified in close collaboration with the HSH research team. For “textures”, we questioned the media types used, as well as the “look and feel” of scholarly works and knowledge production media (e.g., print, physical, map, scholarly paper, photo-essay, audio-visual, data/code). In order to define “transfers”, we investigated administrative, linguistic, and cultural shifts from one domain to another (e.g., change of place names, jurisdictions, ownership, state archives, official memory domains). Our use of the term “transfers” is also a way of acknowledging that the methods and technical procedures embedded in our workflow constitute forms of knowledge production and exchange, transfer, modification, and collaboration (e.g., translations, transcriptions, use of multiple archives, linked data, conceptual mapping). Finally, “transitions” represent the cultural, historical and political transitions that have defined a site of research as a “site of memory”:35 shifting boundaries, administrative transitions, changes of use, modifications and conversions, destruction, erasure, desertion. At the same time, as an interdisciplinary research team, we perform our own epistemological and methodological transitions (e.g., print to digital, book to documentary, archival sources to fieldwork) that have defined in the past but can also enable in the present certain forms of storytelling about the sites and objects of research.
22For the purposes of the “Senseflows” project, we defined a “knowledge unit” as a multi-content resource (e.g., textual document, material artifact, visual and audiovisual asset) that captures a sensory experience or documents a change or transition in the three neighbourhoods we defined as “spatial units”. Considering that these “knowledge units” were diverse and contained different information levels (e.g., archival metadata, sensorial qualities and descriptions), we carried out a flexible modelling of their properties in order to accurately document their metadata. To this end, we used standards and guidelines that ensure the interoperability and the long-term maintenance of the data, such as the Dublin Core, the European Data Model, the Open Geospatial Consortium Standards, and the International Image Interoperability Framework.
23In order to develop a robust, yet flexible, dataset that could both meet the specific research needs of the project but also support its storytelling potential, we needed to find an archival documentation and content management system that met these requirements. We explored and assessed a number of existing platforms, tools and solutions, with the above-mentioned criteria in mind, and more specifically:
- flexibility in terms of documentation of the item /basic information unit;
- customisation and extensibility in terms of items’ properties (metadata standards), item sets, as well as the support of linked open data connections with other resources, archives, and repositories;
- mid to long-term sustainability in terms of the standards and technologies used as well in terms of its further use and enrichment by larger communities of practice;
- open-source software and publicly available (non-proprietary) technical documentation with active community support.
24Among a number of interesting candidate tools, we chose Omeka S,36 a free, open-source web publishing platform for institutions connecting digital cultural heritage collections with other resources online, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University (GMU). Omeka S, a lightweight solution in comparison to traditional institutional repository software such as DSpace and Fedora, uses an unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard and it allows users to publish and exhibit cultural heritage objects, while extending its functionality with themes and plugins. Omeka S is designed for institutional use, providing the capability to host multiple sites which draw from a common pool of resources. This specific feature allows for great expandability in the context of the HSH project and enables the development of multiple websites or applications for different historical case studies and urban spaces.
25Given that content and collections management systems such as Omeka come with their own predefined metadata fields, vocabularies and resource templates, we expanded and customised, where needed, these fields to address the specific needs of the “Senseflows” project (fig. 3). For example, we customised and implemented five different resource templates to reflect the diversity of archival media and materials: 1) Document, 2) Moving Image, 3) Still Image, 4) Physical Object and 5) Sound.
Fig. 3. Archival items listed in the administrative panel of the Omeka S platform.
26We also performed a series of manual normalisation tasks of the documentation at the item level (e.g., item’s title & description) and resolved conflicts where necessary (e.g., terminologies, dates and time periods, locations and alternative place names). Where possible, we decided to preserve variation in language (e.g., the item’s title and description, bibliographic citations) as a reflection of the historical depth and cultural diversity of the resource. In several cases, we preserved the original language (mostly Greek or Turkish) as used in the original, archival description or the source text.
27Building on the data fields and types of items we defined on the administrative “back-end” we were then able to create collections (“item sets”) or exhibitions to be featured on the “Senseflows” website (figs. 4–5).
Fig. 4. The Welcome page of the Senseflows project.
Source: http://senseflows.music.uoa.gr
Fig. 5. View of items on the Senseflows website.
Source: http://senseflows.music.uoa.gr
28Website users can browse items, sites or collections but also explore content in more interactive ways through spatio-temporal storytelling features and visualizations. These features reflect the categories, defined in the data modelling stage, in collaboration with the research team organised as three browse menu items: “Textures”, “Transfers” and “Transitions”.
29The “Transfers” section (fig. 6) follows mobilities and relocations in the late and post-Ottoman periods. It currently features the case study of the several transformations and relocations of the Haghia Sophia pulpit, both in the conversion of the site from a church to a mosque and to the relocation of the pulpit to Istanbul.
30The “Transitions” menu category features a timeline (fig. 7) that follows some key milestones in the trajectory of certain sites as documented through the items associated with them.
Fig. 6. View of the “Transfers” section on the Senseflows website.
Source: http://senseflows.music.uoa.gr
Fig. 7. View of the timeline on the Senseflows website.
Source: http://senseflows.music.uoa.gr
31All of the digital components, resources and infrastructures of the HSH project that are discussed here offer, as a set of combined tools, new ways to conceptualise, explore, and represent the historical trajectories of urban space of the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Greek State, especially through its material and sensorial dimensions. Nevertheless, the project continues to grow as we learn from our experience so far, acknowledge gaps and limitations, and continue to pursue new directions for research and engagement. From the outset, all research team members committed to developing and testing pilot projects and “proof-of-concept” tools―rather than finished, closed deliverables―towards an open source, accessible toolkit. This approach allows for the seamless integration of new tools and components on top of existing data models and infrastructures and can support the collaboration and contributions of new team members in the future. This strategy ensures that all of the digital research and pedagogy tools and resources developed as part of the HSH initiative can be easily maintained, enhanced, and expanded in the near future. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the enhancement of these resources presupposes an active engagement within a growing research and community network of scholars and educators working on digital humanities or on different aspects of the Ottoman past, the transition to the Greek State and their enduring legacies.
32Currently in a beta version, all the digital tools and resources developed as part of the project will be expanded and further enriched and diversified with the addition of new types of research materials and archival assets, data and media formats, as well as languages. Emphasis will also be given to new scales and modalities for research and engagement including mobile and immersive applications. Some of the next steps we have identified planning ahead include:
- adding new entries and expanding the resources in the “Ottoman Heritage in Greece: Map and Bibliography”;
- expanding the spatial coverage and adding new archival sources and case studies to the “Senseflows” website;
- further standardising data modelling item description processes (e.g., resolving conflicts or overlapping of names);
- building semantic links to similar external resources through linked data standards and infrastructures;
- enhancing the existing georeferencing capabilities and the geospatial relations between sites, monuments and archival items;
- enhancing and diversifying all digital resources with additional multilingual content and different media types (e.g., sound, video, 3D models of sites and monuments);
- developing 3D and Virtual Reality applications focusing on sensorial aspects of historic urban sites and monuments;
- developing mobile and Augmented Reality applications for outdoor research, educational and public outreach activities using the data and assets created in the project.
33To a great extent, future work will involve two sets of tasks. On one hand, our aim is to strengthen the internal cohesion of the tools developed by linking the assets they use and the sites or items they document and by highlighting more examples of “flows” or “transitions” across different resources. For example, by further establishing and visualizing, in all their density, the geospatial relationships between sites and monuments as documented in all three beta projects (“Ottoman Heritage in Greece: Map and Bibliography”, the “ASÂR” and the “Senseflows”) we will be able to represent, in more detail, cases of “sensorial assemblages” “textures” or “transitions” to name a few key concepts discussed here.
34At the same time, as we keep adding new assets, media formats, and languages to the existing resources, our goal is to open up this collaborative space to similar digital humanities and interdisciplinary projects but also beyond the domain of strictly defined academic research outputs to include different pedagogical uses, from secondary to higher education, as well as public humanities initiatives that engage with the legacies of the Ottoman past in Greece. The HSH research network is also exploring ways of using its resources in new modalities for educational use and engagement through mobile, location-based and Augmented Reality applications.
35The modular and extensible infrastructure that we employed in developing the pilot projects allows for connecting them to existing digital resources and infrastructures such as, for example, the “Travelogues” repository developed by the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation37 and the “Inspiral” application developed by the Sylvia Papaioannou Foundation,38 thus bringing together a wealth of resources and assets around Ottoman, post-Ottoman, and Modern Greek studies. Such a connection would require collaborative efforts from scholars across different fields in establishing common standards, metadata fields and naming conventions or shared resources such as gazetteers of Ottoman places39 or lists of monuments. In addition, there is great potential in using the open access digital tools and assets compiled and developed as part of the HSH project as reusable educational resources in pedagogical settings as well as materials for dialogue and engagement in public humanities initiatives. This is a potential that remains to be explored.