20th century

Nov 13, 2015

Majallat al-Muqtabas: one of the most important journals of late Ottoman Bilād al-Shām as open, collaborative, scholarly digital edition

[Update: the project has it’s own blog]

20th century/ arabic newspapers/ arabic periodicals/ damascus/ digital editions/ digitized resources/ newspapers/ open access/ periodicals/ tei/ xml/

May 4, 2013

Historical Currency Converter

Conducting historical research, one often encounters odd currencies, measures, and calendars, all of which are bound to space and time. Calender conversion tools can be readily found on the internet (a good example is CalendarHome’s adaptation of Fourmilab’s code), but converters for non-metric currencies and weights are a bit trickier to come by. As I found myself repeatedly computing exchange rates between Ottoman Lira, British Pound Sterling, US Dollars, and French Francs, I wrote a simple javascript and html frontend.

19th century/ 20th century/ currency/ digital humanities/ js/ ottoman empire/ social history/ tools/

Apr 2, 2011

Ottoman newspapers and periodicals online for all of us

After posting the last comment on the exclusive and excluding collections of Ottoman yearbooks, I just found that the Hakki Tarık Us collection at the Beyazit Devlet Kütüphanesi made large parts of its holdings available online in a cooperation with the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Yearbooks, private newspapers, and official gazettes are available in the superb DjVu format, free of charge to every member of the public, and with no restrictions on downloads and further use. All you need is the open source DjVu browser plug-in, which has the somewhat undocumented limitation to run only in 32 bit mode. If one happens to run the latest OSX iteration this is achieved by ticking a box in the application’s (Safari, Firefox, etc.) information dialog inside the finder.

19th century/ 20th century/ digitized resources/ newspapers/ ottoman newspapers/ periodicals/