Ottoman Turkish Discovery Portal
Search
within text and visuals
Discover
new content with automated recommendations based on similarity
Read
in English, Turkish or Ottoman Turkish
a corpus of 7 million pages and 660.000 visuals
Muteferriqa is an online research portal.
It contains an exceptionally rich collection of printed materials
published in the Ottoman Empire from the 18th to mid-20th century.
It paves the way for interdisciplinary collaboration in historical
research through its English and Turkish language support.
It opens new roadways in Ottoman and Turkish studies, and also
Middle East studies.
Teaching Faculty
Turkish transliteration feature
makes Muteferriqa one-of-a-kind tool for Ottoman Turkish teaching at all levels.
Researchers
Muteferriqa makes Ottoman printed sources fully accessible for academic research.
Students
Muteferriqa is a unique tool to teach students with the help of primary sources.
Full-text search and Discovery
In Ottoman Turkish Periodicals and Books
Expanding Frontiers in Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Through its sleek Web interface, Muteferriqa lets you perform full-text search within seconds across millions of pages of its corpus, which consists of virtually all the books and a large majority of periodicals ever printed in Ottoman Turkish. Refining queries through rich and extensive metadata gives relevant cross-sections of the material.
Muteferriqa also features advanced search modalities, namely, wildcard, fuzzy and proximity search, that will take you to your specific target and beyond. Visual search retrieves unique visuals contained in the corpus by matching your textual queries with captions or descriptions of the visual content.
Muteferriqa, by extracting semantic relations and similarities within its corpus, takes you beyond your own queries with its recommendations, sometimes to surprisingly serendipitous discoveries.
Endorsements
I find the vast possibilities offered by Muteferriqa extremely useful for scholars of the Ottoman world. It opens the gate for easy and efficient text-mining and systematic reading of dizzyingly rich but dispersed Ottoman textual material.
Stanford University
Ali Yaycıoğlu
I believe with this website Ottoman teaching with primary sources with a comprehensive content will be much easier and fun way of learning. A strong addition to the field and I believe Muteferriqa will be a helpful tool for researchers, scholars, and students.
University of Pennsylvania
& Former President - AATT
Feride Hatiboğlu
Edhem Eldem
Boğaziçi University
& Collège de France
Muteferriqa enables systematic and precise access to the content of Ottoman books, journals, and newspapers. Such an innovative tool is bound to revolutionize the way we conduct research in this field.
Search Features
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Full-text search in millions of pages of Ottoman Turkish printed books and periodicals
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Advanced search, to combine metadata queries and full-text queries with logical operators
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Wildcard search, where special symbols stand for any character, e.g. to find words with suffixes
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Fuzzy search, where some characters are allowed not to match, e.g. to find spelling variations for foreign names
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Proximity search, to find multiple words within a given distance from each other, potentially within the same sentence or paragraph
Discovery Features
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Discover similar visuals with recommendations based on visual content
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Discover similar titles with content based recommendations
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Discover query terms that potentially lead you to what you are looking for with automatic query suggestions
User Experience
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Keep track of your research with bookmarks and saved searches
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Navigate through the titles with ease using Muteferriqa’s comprehensive index pages
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Use the tailored virtual keyboard to enter your Arabic script queries and to make use of the advanced functionality like proximity search
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Faceted search, to filter search results by metadata
Search and Read in
Your Preferred Language
Sense selection for the English query, enriched with Turkish synonyms
"balance" :
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Denge [equilibrium]
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Kantar, terazi [scales]
Ottoman spelling variations for the Turkish query
"balance" matching any of the following and many more:
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balance, terazi, kantar, kantarcının, تراضی, ترازی, ترازینك, قنطار, قنطارله, قنطارجی, قنطاردن, ...
Enabling Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Muteferriqa overcomes language barriers in research and paves the way for cross-domain research collaborations by letting its users to search and read both in Turkish and in English in addition to Ottoman Turkish.
Thanks to its visual discovery features, Muteferriqa offers unique discovery opportunities not only for Ottoman historians, but also for art historians, designers and even engineers from all fields.
Legacy from Müteferrika to Muteferriqa
İbrahim Müteferrika, pioneer of the information revolution in the Ottoman Empire, represents multiculturalism and multilingualism. Likewise, Muteferriqa will soon become the universal source for original materials of the Ottoman hinterland regardless of language or form.