The “ONiT Explorer” event at the Austrian Academy of Sciences presented a new type of database that is accessible to both academics and the interested public. For the first time, an extensive corpus of Ottoman travelogues has been made accessible in words and images. This database provides a valuable basis for research into transnational environmental and natural history.
An interdisciplinary project team consisting of researchers from the Institute for the Study of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkans of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) in Vienna, the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and Marmara University in Istanbul has developed an AI-supported workflow for identifying and analyzing texts and images. The special thing about it is that the computer models work exclusively on the basis of the images and are not dependent on metadata created by humans.