Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Ottoman Greeks of the United States Digital History Project (OGUS) is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary research project at the University of Florida. OGUS was established in 2015 with the support of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. Its main goal is to raise the public’s awareness and inspire scholarly research about the experiences of Ottoman Greek immigrants and refugees in the United States. To achieve this goal, the OGUS project leverages methodologies common to various disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This paper highlights the methodologies through an overview of the OGUS project’s collections. The OGUS project’s collections include 250 interviews with descendants of Ottoman Greek immigrants throughout the US. During the interviews, many of the descendants donated two- and three-dimensional images related to places and people they recollected, as well as objects their ancestors transferred from the Ottoman Empire to the US. The paper highlights specific examples from the collection of the over 50,000+ images that are part of the OGUS project. The paper concludes with a presentation of the OGUS Migration Map. The OGUS Migration Map is an interactive heat map that traces the migration patterns of over 6000 immigrants from regions of the Ottoman Empire that overlap with Turkey to the United States between 1900 - 1924.