Witnessing Ottoman Studies’ recent integration of AI is exciting for the field’s development in terms of its inclusion of wider, more global audiences, the emergence of new research fields, the application of advanced technologies to archival collections, and the discovery of new materials for study. Hence, while technological innovations have been reshaping historical research and methodology, they have also added new dimensions to historiography and contributed to the development of Digital Ottoman Studies.

2025/6 was my first year as editor for Central Asian Studies at The DO, having previously been a contributing writer for Northeast Asian Studies. It has been an illuminating experience to collaborate with the Central Asian Studies writers over the last 12 months and be offered a window into their research interests and ongoing work. Now is the perfect time to reflect as the dawn breaks on a new publishing year.

My previous work on Sindhi literature in post-Partition involves PG Sindhi Library, Sindhi Halchal Archive, and Sindhi Sanchaya. Posts dealing with each of these projects can be found here. In this post, I discuss an oral history project from libraries that house Sindhi books in India. In the process of learning about Sindhi language and literature and while working on Sindhi Sanchaya, I came across these libraries and their journeys of struggles around preserving Sindhi books and reading-writing culture.

This is our first interview as part of the NIHU DH × The DO Interviews. This series features interviews with researchers working at institutions affiliated with the National Institutes for the Humanities exploring different projects, ideas, and initiatives. The first interview with Prof. Kawase Itushi focuses on the National Museum of Ethnology's journal, TRAJECTORIA, its history, the difficulties associated with setting it up, and the ways in which it advances multimodal representation of research.

Read all of the posts by Leon Woltermann on The Digital Orientalist

Apply Advanced Training in Digitization of Older Texts —ANTIDOTE 2026–2027The University of Iceland (Reykjavík), Charles University (Prague), Klosterneuburg Abbey Library (Klosterneuburg, Austria), Co...

Welcome back! This post kicks off the 2026/27 year, and we have a lot to share! Before looking forward, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past 12 months. We have published 78 pieces that…

The Digital Orientalist is pleased to announce its annual open call for contributors and team members for the 2026-2027 academic year.  New to our work? Learn more about The DO here.  We …

In recent months, I have come to identify as a neo-Luddite or, as a colleague said in jest, “a technophobe and a Buddhist monk.” With this change in my life came new standards in my relationship wi…

The Digital Orientalist is pleased to announce its annual open call for contributors and team members for the 2026-2027 academic year.  New to our work? Learn more about The DO here.  We …

The Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Middle East/South Asia Studies invite applications for the newly established Bita Daryabari Endowment Postdoctoral Scholar/Lecturer position...

The Digital Orientalist is pleased to announce its annual open call for contributors and team members for the 2026-2027 academic year.  New to our work? Learn more about The DO here.  We seek indiv…

Photographic repository of people reading in twentieth-century China | 中国 20世纪阅读行动摄影典藏

This is a guest post by Damian Mandzunowski.1 The author bio is below. The premise behind this piece is simple: to show how even basic digital tools (such as digital curatorship, a website, and a s…

Introduction In my previous work exploring the first volume of Künhü’l-Ahbar, Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî’s work on history and geography from the 16th century, I established a computational pipeline to…

Experiment in local IIIF fetch and store. Contribute to sarahmaeve/go-iiif development by creating an account on GitHub.

Introduction In the middle Nile Valley—the region extending from present-day Aswan in southern Egypt to northern Sudan—Christian Nubian kingdoms flourished from the sixth to the fifteenth century. …

This is a guest post by Abdulqadir K Haidermota. This post is the second of a two-part series. The first outlines the background of the pilot study and its methodology; this post focuses on the out…

This is a guest post by Mona Hassan Ahmed Sawy. Over the past decade, Coptic studies, in all its branches—language, history, and art—has steadily entered the digital age. While the field was tradit…

Between October and November 2025, Prof. David Michelson served as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, within the framework of the …