Digital Preservation, Publishing, and HTR of Armeno-Turkish Manuscripts, Printed Books, and Newspapers from the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna (MEKHITAR)

Digital Preservation, Publishing, and HTR of Armeno-Turkish Manuscripts, Printed Books, and Newspapers from the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna (MEKHITAR) Aysu Akcan (bio), Hülya Çelik (bio), Yavuz Köse (bio), and Ani Sargsyan (bio) KEYWORDS Armeno-Turkish, transcription, manuscripts, Ottoman Turkish, Mekhitarist Congregation Introduction Throughout most of its history, the Ottoman Empire included among its subjects diverse ethnic groups, language communities, and confessions. Within this rich cultural heritage, Armeno-Turkish manuscripts and printed texts, Turkish texts written and printed in Armenian script (called Hayadaṛ Trk'erēn), occupy a special place in the Ottoman cultural milieu. Armeno-Turkish manuscripts were produced beginning in the fourteenth century. From the eighteenth century until the 1960s, Armeno-Turkish texts were printed in a variety of formats and genres including religious works, poetry, novels, dictionaries, theatre plays, folk literature, law books, and newspapers.1 [End Page 67] The MEKHITAR project will be the first comprehensive investigation into a large corpus of Armeno-Turkish manuscripts, prints, and newspapers produced between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries and located in the library of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna. For this project, a variety of disciplines and methods, including cultural heritage science, Turkish and Armenian studies, conservation, and digital humanities (DH), will be brought together. This multidisciplinary approach will not only ensure sustainable and cutting-edge access to this unique collection, but it will enable a more inclusive and shared vision of a complex cultural heritage. For this, the team members will investigate three intertwined areas: Armeno-Turkish book/print culture, intellectual history, and literary/linguistic history. MEKHITAR aims to overcome nationalistic approaches to and debates on Armenian and Turkish common cultural heritage. The long-term benefits of MEKHITAR are manifold: (1) it will raise awareness of an important entangled heritage collection; (2) it will present interdisciplinary ways of engaging with heritage science and manuscript (print) culture; (3) it will provide new learning and training opportunities for researchers and students, and thus foster new paths for both Armenian and Turkish studies; (4) it will digitize the collection, make publicly available, and publish the results of the project in open source format; (5) it will foster relations between academia and Armenian institutions in Armenia and the diaspora;2 and (6) it will add to the burgeoning scholarship on so-called minor literatures. In the following, we first introduce the collection of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna, outline the methods used to preserve the collection, and discuss the steps involved in its documentation and examination. We then describe how the collection will be made accessible and, finally, we suggest DH tools and a transcription standard for further research and analysis. 1. The Collection of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna The Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna, established in 1811, is a site of a tangled cultural heritage—a place where the history of Armenians, and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires can be traced not only through the monastery complex, but above all through its of more than 2,600 Armenian manuscripts, 150,000 books, and the world's largest collection of Armenian newspapers and [End Page 68] periodicals.3 Within the rich collection of the Mekhitarist Library is a considerable number of manuscripts and prints in Armeno-Turkish. Click for larger view View full resolution The Armeno-Turkish Collection 2. Preserving the Collection MEKHITAR will examine the entire collection of Armeno-Turkish manuscripts and books with the goal of identifying those in need of conservation treatment, and, through the use of various technologies and scientific processes, providing information on the kinds of inks used, paper types, watermarks, binding processes, ink colors, and scripts. For this purpose, a number of innovative and non-destructive methods such as microscopy, imaging, and IR and Raman spectroscopy will be applied.7 This opportunity will [End Page 69] also prepare the ground for innovative solutions for the sustainable restoration and preservation of damaged manuscripts and early prints. 3. Documenting and Examining the Collection Cataloguing will be carried out with material analysis to ensure more careful procedures and minimal intervention. For cataloguing, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) module "Manuscript Description" (TEI-ms) will be applied,8 and with further steps (conversion of TEI XML files to...