In my first Editor’s Digest in December 2024, I summarised the posts of the Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies team published between September 2024 and December 2024. In this edition, I will give a brief overview of those that were published during 2025, a year marked by a rich variety in themes, approaches, and reflections on the application of DH in this multi-lingual and multi-scriptural field.
In addition to already well-established contributors and guest contributors, in September 2025, two new members joined the Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies team: Zhaleh Nayebossadrian and Enes Yılandiloğlu. Zhaleh Nayebossadrian (PhD, University of Rome, La Sapienza) is a researcher and digital archivist specialising in the history of Iran, who currently works for the ILEMED project at the Department of Oriental Studies at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Enes Yılandiloğlu is a research assistant in Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. He focuses on 18th-century British travel writing to the “Orient” and has an interest in Digital Ottoman Turkish Studies.
2025 opened with a post by guest contributor Helen Giunashvili. The post “Medieval Georgian Shāhnāmeh Manuscripts at the National Centre of Manuscripts of Georgia (Rostomiani)” presented a little-known corpus of medieval Georgian translations of the Shāhnāmeh preserved at the National Centre of Manuscripts of Georgia. The post provided digitizations of these unique documents, making The DO a space to foster their accessibility.
The remaining posts offer more technical procedures for the application of DH tools to Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies and might also provide useful sources of inspiration for their application to other fields.
Emine Turkmen explored how the data visualization platform Flourish can be used to represent patterns of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States by transforming historical datasets into interactive maps and charts. “Flourish: Visualizing Ottoman Migration to the United States” demonstrates how digital visualization can enhance both analytical depth and appeal to the public.
Dena Shamsizadeh wrote “Bridging Narratives and Data: ResearchSpace 4.0.0. and the Power of Knowledge Graphs.” She introduced version 4.0.0 of ResearchSpace, focusing on its capacity to structure cultural heritage data through knowledge graphs. The article explains how semantic modelling enables researchers to link people, places, objects, and concepts in ways that go beyond traditional relational databases.
Enes Yılandiloğlu’s post “From Text to Map: A Reproducible Geocoding Pipeline for Ottoman Studies” offered a reproducible geocoding pipeline designed to extract and map place names from Ottoman texts. The post outlined a workflow that includes toponym extraction, normalization, disambiguation, and cartographic visualization.
Zachary Butler’s “Analyzing Collation Files: Apatosaurus” introduced readers to the web app Apatosaurus, a tool that allows the creation, editing, visualization and analysis of digital apparatus. In “Exploring the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room API,” the author shows how thanks to the Application Programming Interface (API) of New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room researchers can programmatically access manuscript metadata, textual data, and digital images.
Several of these posts highlight one of the key applications of digital humanities: visualization. Graphs, charts, and maps enable scholars to identify patterns, relationships, or trajectories that might otherwise remain difficult to detect and convey. Where sources are often multilingual, dispersed, and heterogeneous, data visualization might offer powerful ways to integrate different types of evidence and effectively communicate them to wider audiences. In particular, this might also mirror the necessities of the turn to micro-history, mobility, and migration that increasingly characterises research in this field.
In 2026, the activities of the Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies team continue uninterrupted. Posts by Zachary Butler, Zhaleh Nayebossadrian, and Enes Yılandiloğlu will further our exploration of the possibilities and applications of digital humanities and Persian, Turkic, and Biblical Studies.
