Woven into War: Digital Humanities and Sephardi Women in the Late Ottoman Empire and Its Diaspora, 1908 - 1945

Abstract

This thesis presents OverText_{history}, a novel piece of text visualization software, that enables historians to enhance their research by making sentence-level comparisons of primary source material. It also presents a use case of OverText_{history} by way of a novel historical study of Sephardi Jewish women's experiences of wars during the 1908 - 1945 period in territories of the Ottoman Empire. Through a hybrid digital and analog investigation, I tell a complicated story of changing attitudes, communities, and social roles surrounding Sephardi women and argue that OverText_{history} is helpful for historical research in both technical and creative ways.