The "Digital Methods for the Study of Migration in the Aegean Region" project, led by Andreas Guidi, is the winner of the France-Berkeley Fund 2023-2024 call.

Established in 1993 as a partnership with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Fond France-Berkeley (FFB) facilitates and supports interdisciplinary exchanges between researchers and professors at the University of California, Berkeley and their French colleagues. Its primary mission of the Fond France-Berkeley (FFB) is to help advance high-quality research, foster interdisciplinary research, encourage new partnerships, and promote long-standing institutional and intellectual cooperation between France and the United States.

Project sponsors

Andreas Guidi is a senior lecturer at Inalco and a member of the Centre de recherche Europes-Eurasie (CREE). A specialist in contemporary history, his research focuses on Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and contacts between the Italian and (post-)Ottoman worlds. In his first book, Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean (University of Toronto Press, 2022), he studied the multi-faith context of Rhodes to explore imperial transformations during the transition from Ottoman to Italian rule in the early 20th century through intergenerational relations as well as youth imaginaries. Her current research project examines illicit trafficking between the Mediterranean and the Balkans in the mid-twentieth century.

Christine Philliou is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California - Berkeley. She specializes in the history of the Balkans and the Middle East since the 17th century, with a particular focus on the emergence of Greek and Turkish nation-states from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. More broadly, she is interested in comparative empires and the interfaces between cultures and histories in Europe and the Middle East. She is the author of two books, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), and Turkey: A Past Against History (2021). She is currently working on a third book and developing a collaborative project on Greek Orthodox communities in the context of late Ottoman Istanbul/Constantinople (1821-1923) using a wide range of Ottoman and Greek sources.

Digital Methods for the Study of Migration in the Aegean Region, 1821-1945

Project objectives

Our project explores data science methods for the study of mobilities in Ottoman and post-Ottoman society with a focus on the Aegean region, namely Anatolia and Southeastern Europe). We pay particular attention to the multilingual dimension of primary sources (in Greek, Italian, Ottoman and modern Turkish, Ladino) and to the diversity that concerns the causes, experiences, and routes of mobility observable in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states (Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia with regard to Macedonia and Italy for the Dodecanese).

Through two methodological workshops, a virtual seminar and a platform, we discuss tools for creating databases and visualizing them from material already collected.

The project contributes to the debate in two historiographical areas. Firstly, it encourages quantitative and visual approaches to the study of post-Ottoman transformation. Before and after the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, the Aegean region was marked by the destruction of multilingual and multi-confessional coexistence, wars as well as military and colonial occupations, disputed borders and a nationalization of the political and social realm. Quantitative and digital projects represent a novelty in the historiography of this area, which the project aims to develop. It builds on the "post-imperial turn" in Ottoman and Balkan studies, which in particular studies social and intellectual phenomena by placing individual and family trajectories at the center of analysis beyond the "rupture" of 1923. We will look at various case studies - such as the community of Greek citizens in Ottoman Istanbul or marriages in Rhodes during the Italian occupation.

Secondly, the project studies the intersection between mobility, intercommunality and the production of space. It focuses on the Aegean region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to foster a dialogue between Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean and (post)Ottoman studies. We use the data collected to highlight how mobility across state borders and shifts in sovereignty helped transform space at multiple scales: connections and networks, but also the displacement and absence of vanished communities that haunt neighborhoods, towns, and the Aegean region as a whole. We'll be in dialogue with fellow historians who will be speaking in our seminar, and with digital humanities experts from Berkeley's D-Lab. This will enable us to enrich the discussion of digital methods and cultural areas, provide training for the members involved, and consider a common platform for visualizing our data analyses.

Associated team members and their projects:

Zeynep Ertugrul (PhD student, CETOBaC EHESS /Humboldt University Berlin)
The network of "people's preachers" (Halk hatipleri) in Republican Turkey.

Andrea Gritti (Doctoral student, CETOBaC EHESS / Institut Convergences Migrations)
The Italo-Ottoman Jewish merchants of Salonika (Francos) and their commercial network in
the Macedonian hinterland.

Firuzan Melike Sümertaş (Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley)
Mapping the scholarly networks of the Greek Literary Society of Constantinople.

Hilal Tümer (PhD student, UC Berkeley)
Mapping the 19th-century Istanbul neighborhoods of Arnavutöy and Balat through Ottoman censuses.

Christin Zurbach (PhD student, UC Berkeley)
Mapping the medical profession in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire and Greece.