Muteferriqa 

Ottoman and Turkish Studies Discovery Portal

Muteferriqa is an online research portal that contains an exceptionally rich collection of printed materials published in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. It lets you perform full-text search within seconds across millions of pages of its corpus, which consists of virtually all the books and a large majority of periodicals ever printed in Ottoman Turkish. Muteferriqa also features advanced search modalities that will take you to your specific target and beyond. Visual search retrieves unique visuals contained in the corpus by matching your textual queries with captions or descriptions of the visual content.

Muteferriqa overcomes language barriers in research and paves the way for cross-domain research collaborations by letting its users to search and read both in Turkish and in English in addition to Ottoman Turkish. Thanks to its visual discovery features, Muteferriqa offers unique discovery opportunities not only for Ottoman historians, but also for art historians, designers and even engineers from all fields.

According to İbrahim Müteferrika's treatise "Vesîletü’t-tıbâa" presented to the Grand Vizier Damat İbrahim Pasha, "Printed books help readers discover much more effectively if a keyword index is provided." Operating in this spirit, Muteferriqa provides accurate and comprehensive discovery opportunities in a vast collection of Ottoman Turkish printed materials. Thanks to the printing press, İbrahim Müteferrika realized his desire to spread knowledge and accelerated the transfer of information from minds to paper. Muteferriqa reverses the process and reunites the information stored in digital images of printed materials with the minds of contemporary researchers.