Mapping Ottoman Epirus website launched

The team behind Mapping Ottoman Epirus (MapOE) has recently launched their new website, featuring exciting visuals, archives, and interactive maps that bring the regions of the Ottoman Empire to life.

MapOE seeks to better understand how the Ottoman Empire operated through big data, spatial and network analysis, visualization, and other digital methods. Their focus is Epirus, a region in modern-day Western Greece and Southern Albania, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This particular area offers exciting insight into the Ottoman Empire because it was a strategic junction on the Adriatic coasts, connecting Europe and the Ottoman lands. Their new website provides visualizations of infrastructural, relational, and eventual spectrums, and hopes to transform the use of digital historical inquiry by revealing how regional orders came into being, operated, intermingled with other orders (local, imperial and global), and finally collapsed.

Over the last three years, numerous digital projects have been produced under MapOE, each based on spatial and quantitative analyses centering data extracted from multilingual archival sources from the Ottoman period. Their new website now makes these projects easily accessible to a wide audience, and highlights important historical lessons to be learned from this significant region and time period.

MapOE is a CESTA affiliated group, in collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research - National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens. It is designed and coordinated by Ali Yaycioglu, Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East History and the Director of Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford, with Antonis Hadjikyriacou, a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Political Science and History at Panteion University in Athens and Affiliate Scholar at CESTA, and Erik Steiner, the co-director and co-founder of the Spatial History Project at CESTA, as well as an international multidisciplinary research team of scholars based in California, Turkey, Greece, and beyond. It has been featured as a leading project in the field of Digital History: the team was invited to partner with the Pelagios Commons and World Historical Gazetteer, as well as Linked Open Data discussions within the DH global community. In 2017, MapOE was chosen as a featured project at the LinkedPast III conference at Stanford.

CESTA congratulates everyone involved in MapOE on their new website and ongoing work!