Muteferriqa

Ottoman Turkish Discovery Portal

Search

within text and visuals of Ottoman Turkish printed materials

Discover

new content serendipitously with recommendations based on content similarity

Read

on a sleek user interface featuring smooth transitions

Teaching Faculty
Widen your students’ horizon.
Researchers
Take your research to the digital age.
Students
Get prepared for research.

Testimonials

Which historian of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey has not dreamt of being able to conduct word searches on the mass of printed material? By adapting to the Arabic script this common feature of most Western printed source collections and archives, Muteferriqa enables systematic and precise access to the content of books, journals, and newspapers published throughout this period. Such an innovative tool is bound to revolutionize the way we conduct research in this field.

Edhem EldemBoğaziçi University & Collège de France

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.

Feride HatiboğluUniversity of Pennsylvania &
President - American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages

I find the vast possibilities offered by Muteferriqa extremely useful for scholars of the Ottoman word. It opens the gate for easy and efficient text-mining and systematic reading of dizzyingly rich but disperse Ottoman textual material.

Ali YaycıoğluStanford University

Full-text search in Ottoman Turkish Periodicals and Books

Expanding Frontiers in Ottoman and Turkish Studies

Muteferriqa, by Miletos, is a discovery portal for Ottoman Turkish printed documents. It opens new roadways in Ottoman and Turkish studies, and also Middle East 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.

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.

Search Features

Full-text search in millions of pages of Ottoman Turkish printed books and periodicals
Advanced search, to combine metadata queries and full-text queries with logical operators
Wildcard search, where special symbols stand for any character, e.g. to find words with suffixes
Fuzzy search, where some characters are allowed not to match, e.g. to find spelling variations for foreign names
Proximity search, to find multiple words within a given distance from each other, potentially within the same sentence or paragraph

muteferriqa_website_search-results_screenshot_perspective_less

Discovery Features

Discover similar visuals with recommendations based on visual content
Discover similar titles with content based recommendations
Discover query terms that potentially lead you to what you are looking for with automatic query suggestions

User Experience

Keep track of your research with bookmarks and saved searches
Navigate through the titles with ease using Muteferriqa’s comprehensive index pages
Use the tailored virtual keyboard to enter your Arabic script queries and to make use of the advanced functionality like proximity search
Faceted search, to filter search results by metadata