A Digital Ottoman Studies Panel by the OKTA Team at CIEPO 26 Varna

The OKTA team brought its research — combining digital humanities, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence methods in Ottoman and Turkish studies — to an international academic platform. As part of the CIEPO 26 Symposium held in Varna on 23–27 June 2026, team members presented their work in the panel titled "Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models in Ottoman Studies." According to the official symposium program, the panel was held on Thursday, 25 June 2026, from 14:30 to 16:00, in Hall D.

While the panel was chaired by Dr. Mustafa İlter, the session featured three different studies on how Ottoman and early Republican-era sources can be re-read through AI-supported methods. The program included Prof. Dr. Umut Karabulut's paper "History from Below in the Context of Digital Humanities: Analyzing the Public and Government Agenda in the Second Constitutional Era Press through Artificial Intelligence Methods (1908–1909)," Dr. Mustafa/İlter's paper "Cross-Individual Sentiment Analysis for Cemal Paşa's Socio-Political Network," and Prof. Dr. Sezen Karabulut's paper "Digital Traces of Women's Experience from Absolutism to the Republic: A Digital Reading of Naciye Neyyal."

The panel addressed a range of sources and themes, including the Second Constitutional Era press, the public and government agenda, Cemal Paşa's socio-political network, and the digital traces of women's experience through the case of Naciye Neyyal. The papers are based on methods analyzing historical texts through data science, natural language processing, and large language models.

The panel has a methodological connection to OSPA, a project previously carried out by the team. The methods developed in OSPA through period testimonies, memoirs, and socio-political networks were applied, in the CIEPO panel, to the Second Constitutional Era press, cross-individual sentiment analysis, women's history, and large language models.