About this talk: My current digital project, The Hajj Trail (www.hajjtrail.com), aims to build an interactive teaching tool that allows students to engage with the social history of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. The Hajj Trail takes students along the route of the seventeenth-century Ottoman pilgrimage road to Mecca, introducing them to the cultural history of the early modern Ottoman World. The goal of the project is to present the history of the Ottoman Empire/Islamic World to a broader public in a narrative which does not center perceptions of the region around violence and warfare – as is depicted in most other digital media. The entire project is built through a user-friendly coding platform called Twine and presents students with historical scenarios based upon early modern travel and pilgrimage narratives. The talk will outline both the goals of this project and overview the tools that we utilized to build it.
About the speaker: Dr. Tyler Kynn is an instructor of Global History at the University of Memphis, and his primary research focus is the seventeenth-century Ottoman pilgrimage to Mecca. Dr. Kynn received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2020 and combines his research on the Ottoman hajj with his digital humanities project, The Hajj Trail. This project aims to be the public facing digital medium for his study of the intersection of the early modern hajj, empire, and the seasonality of imperial power.