Editing Multilingual Grand Vizierial Correspondence in TEI: The GraViz project

Editing Multilingual Grand Vizierial Correspondence in TEI: The GraViz project   This poster charts new territories: Ottomanists and historians have studied source material available in Turkish and European archives for a long time. While research has produced numerous historiographical outcomes that draw on those sources, the number of scholarly editions of sources remained low as a consequence of the dispersal of sources and the specific challenges of multilingual textual transmission. The limitations to access such resources include that most existing collections provide little to no open source data.   The project ›The Ottoman Grand Vizierate (1560s to 1760s)‹ – GraViz in short – centers around the diplomatic correspondence of six selected grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire, preserved in the archives in Istanbul and Vienna. The project’s editorial mission is to apply state of the art TEI encoding to these letters, which survive in multiple languages: The GraViz team transcribes texts in Ottoman Turkish, Latin, and German language, and translates all Ottoman Turkish texts and a select group of German and Latin letters into English. Documents written in other languages, e.g. Italian and French, may follow in later stages, as well as detailed prosopographical information on the individual grand viziers.   The editorial team references named entities (persons, places) and dates (challenges in premodern calendar systems ensue), and provides keywords and an English-language abstract. CorrespDesc and other editorial metadata are included in the editions, along with facsimile images that show the challenging layout and reading order. The project team published the first batch of edited documents, containing the correspondence of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (in office: 1565–1579), at https://qhod.net/context:graviz?locale=en. The poster contribution focuses on how the GraViz project creates TEI XML data (schema, auxiliary standOff data, teiHeader, alignment of original and translation/s), which serve as a solid digital foundation for future research on textual artifacts of diplomacy between the Ottoman Empire and European courts.