The American Historical Association is the largest membership association of professional historians in the world. The annual meeting, which in 2024 took place in San Francisco, was my first time at the AHA. I presented a poster about my research at the intersection of Ottoman history and computational linguistics. I created this page to share supplemantary information, including translations and links to data.

Briefly put, the poster focused on topic modelling on 4 court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries, covering primarily the period from the 1750s through early 1800s. These histories were acquired from scholarly editions and theses, which can be found in the bibliography below. I segmented them following the internal divisions of the texts, first dividing them by year and second by the subheadings. I preprocessed these text segments to clear stopwords and normalize words, removing inflections through a customized stemming algorithm and further rule-based text cleaning. I used Gensim’s LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to extract 50 topics. Text segments, both in original and in preprocessed version and the topics that are matched to those segments with their probabilities can be found here.

Topic Models

In this section below you can find more details about the 10 topics directly referenced in the poster. I provided below the original word cloud, its English translation, and the probabilities associated with the words in each topic. Words and probabilities for all 50 topics can be found here.

You scroll down this page to see the topics in sequential order or can use these links to navigate on the page.

1. Topic 2
2. Topic 12
3. Topic 14
4. Topic 15
5. Topic 18
6. Topic 21
7. Topic 22
8. Topic 35
9. Topic 36
10. Topic 49

Topic 2

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 12

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 14

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 15

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 18

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 21

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 22

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 35

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 36

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Topic 49

Word Clouds

Words, Translations, Probabilities

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ahmed Cevdet Paşa. Târîh-i Cevdet, vols 1, 2, 3. 2nd ed. İstanbul: Matbaa-I Osmâniyye, 1892. In M. İpşirli. “Ahmed Cevdet Paşa. Târîh-i Cevdet.” Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2018. Ahmed Resmi Efendi. Hulâsatüʼl-iʻtibâr. [manuscript, 1783]. In E. Menchinger. “Hulâsatüʼl-iʻtibâr = A Summary of Admonitions: A Chronicle of the 1768-1774 Russian-Ottoman War.” İstanbul: Isis Press, 2011. Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi. Mehâsinü’l-Âsâr ve Hakāʼiku’l-Ahbâr, 1752-1774. [manuscript, 1787]. In N. Sağlam. “Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi ve Mehâsinü’l-Âsâr ve Hakāʼiku’l-Ahbâr’ı.” [dissertation, 2014]. Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi. Mehâsinü’l-Âsâr ve Hakāʼiku’l-Ahbâr, 1774-1779. [manuscript, 1787]. In Mücteba İlgürel. “Ahmed Vasıf Efendi Mehâsînü’l – Âsâr ve Hakâikü’l – Ahbâr 1774-1779 (H. 1188- 1193).” Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2014. Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi. Mehâsinü’l-Âsâr ve Hakāʼiku’l-Ahbâr, 1782-1787. [manuscript, 1787]. In Mücteba İlgürel. “Ahmed Vasıf Efendi Mehâsînü’l – Âsâr ve Hakâikü’l – Ahbâr.” Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1994. Enveri Sadullah Efendi. Tarih-i Enveri I, 1768-1774. [manuscript, 1775]. In M. S. Çalışkan. “(Vekayi’nüvis) Enveri Sadullah Efendi ve Tarihinin I . Cildi’nin Metin ve Tahlili (1182 - 1188 /1768 - 1774).” [dissertation, 2000]. Enveri Sadullah Efendi. Tarih-i Enveri II, 1774-1783. [manuscript, 1783]. In H. Çiçek. “(Vekāyiʻnüvis) Sadullah Enverî Efendi ve Tarihi’nin II. Cildinin Metin Ve Tahlili (1187–1197/1774–1783).” [dissertation, 2018]. Enveri Sadullah Efendi. Tarih-i Enveri, 1786-1792. [manuscript, 1794]. In Ü.F.Bayram. “Enverî Târîhi: Üçüncü Cild (Metin Ve Değerlendirme).” [dissertation, 2014]. Nuri For comparison: Ahmed Câvid Bey. Müntehabât. [manuscript, 1802]. Transcribed and analyzed by Adnan Baycar. “Ahmed Câvid Bey’in Müntehabâtı (Tahlil ve Tenkitli Metin).” [dissertation, 1999].