Project Lead: Altuğ Yalçıntaş, Ankara University
ORCID: 0000-0002-3344-0497
Active Research Team: Özgür Kızılyurt, Vural Başaran, Alaaddin Tok, Neşe Voyvoda, Şebnem Gelmedi, Ekin Bal, Orçun Kasap Keywords: Turkish economic ideas, digital humanities, AI-assisted historical research
The Turkish Political Economy Database is a digital humanities project that documents over 700 economists, translators, and thinkers who have contributed to the development of economic thought in the Republic of Türkiye and the Ottoman Empire from the 1800s to the present. This project integrates human and AI-assisted methodologies to curate, analyse, and narrate rich biographical and bibliographical data.
Our approach combines traditional archival research with cutting-edge tools, including large language models (LLMs), to generate AI-supported essays that undergo rigorous human review. The project aims to create an openly accessible, searchable platform for researchers interested in Turkish economic history, political economy, and digital historiography.
Our research findings are currently under review and will be published in The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Turkish Economists and Economics in 2026, with the full project scheduled for completion in 2031. The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Turkish Economists and Economics is a digital humanities project that documents over 700 economists, translators, and thinkers who have shaped economic thought in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Türkiye since the 1800s. Drawing from The Turkish Political Economy Database, from the 1800s to Date, the project curates detailed biographical, bibliographical, and textual data, using AI tools for analysis and essay generation. The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Turkish Economists and Economics includes contributions from Turkish and non-Turkish scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. AI-assisted tools and large language models, are employed to summarise, visualise, and interpret historical data. Final entries undergo rigorous human review to ensure academic integrity and accuracy. The project not only enhances understanding of Türkiye’s intellectual history of economics but also demonstrates the potential of computational methods and AI tools in historical research.
- Create biographical entries for ~700 economists, scholars, translators, and policymakers.
- Build and maintain a structured dataset of biographical and bibliographical metadata.
- Use AI-assisted tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, NotebookLM) to generate summaries and essays.
- Publish interactive visualisations and searchable entries.
- Provide open access to data, code, and documentation for scholarly reuse.
Datasets withing the Database include:
- The Turkish Political Economy Biographical Library is a dataset where we compile biographical information on economists, authors, and influential figures who shaped Ottoman and Turkish economies from the 1800s to the present,
- The Turkish Political Economy Bibliographical Library is a dataset where we compile bibliographical information on the authors who we cover in the Turkish Political Economy Biographical Library,
- The Turkish Political Economy Library of Passages is a dataset containing translated economic excerpts from significant economists' publications. When complete, this dataset will serve as an anthology of economic writings from the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Türkiye,
- The Turkish Political Economy Deep Research Library is a dataset that uses major AI tools such as Gemini and Perplexity to analyze economists' contributions and create biographical summaries. This dataset provides AI-generated life stories of selected authors,
- The Turkish Political Economy Timeline of Events is a dataset that chronicles major events, including significant publications and political developments since the 1800s,
- The Turkish Political Economy Schools and Departments Directory is a dataset containing a list of institutions that have offered economics courses. This directory tracks the historical development of economics education in Turkish institutions from the Ottoman era to modern times.
- The Turkish Political Economy List of Economics Courses and Lecturers (Where Available) is a dataset cataloging economics courses offered throughout the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Türkiye. The dataset includes lecturer names when available and provides source citations for all entries.
- The Turkish Political Economy Periodicals Library is a catalog of economics periodicals published since the 1850s, including their publication years. Full source citations accompany all entries.
- The Turkish Political Economy Index of Institutions is a dataset containing the names of a selection of institutions mentioned in this project. A brief description of each institution is also provided.
- The Turkish Political Economy Glossary is a specialized dictionary of terms unique to Ottoman Turkish and Modern Turkish economic discourse. This resource is designed for international readers unfamiliar with Türkiye's institutional history and specialized terminology.
Entries in the database include:
- Turkish-speaking scholars active from the 1800s onward (e.g., Mehmet Şerif, Sencer Divitçioğlu),
- Non-Turkish authors with published research on the Ottoman/Turkish economy (e.g., Charles Issawi),
- Orientalists, travellers, diplomats contributing economic accounts (e.g., Nassau Senior),
- Immigrant and visiting economists who taught in Türkiye (e.g., Alexander Rüstow),
- Practitioners and officials involved in institutionalising economic policy (e.g., Celal Bayar).
This project employs digital humanities techniques including:
- Data curation: over 80 metadata fields per author (e.g., education, publications, nationality),
- AI-assisted summarisation and essay writing, using LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude,
- Document digitisation and archival work (scanning and transcribing sources),
- Data visualisation and mapping, available interactively on Github, Tableau, Notion, and Graph Commons
- Human-in-the-loop editorial process to verify all AI-generated content for scholarly rigour.
Each entry is derived from structured data and enriched with narrative elements, references, and visual data. Biographical essays are supported by textual sources, citations, and metadata exports.
The project leverages large language models for:
- Optical character recognition (OCR) and Ottoman script transliteration,
- Text summarisation from historical PDFs, JPEGs, and scanned archives,
- AI dialogues that simulate expert historical analysis (e.g., via the "AI Historian" model),
- Automatic bibliography generation and citation mapping.
These tools augment traditional historiographic methods and enable novel forms of research, such as thematic or regional citation networks.
AI Historian is a custom-built artificial intelligence assistant developed for the Turkish Political Economy Database, from the 1800s to Date. AI Historian uses Open AI’s large language model and the available structured datasets (see above) to explore the history of economic ideas in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Türkiye. It is instructed to deliver factual and ethically responsible answers by analysing curated biographical records and bibliographic sources. It contributes to the historical reconstruction and the digital preservation of Türkiye’s economic thought.
This project contributes to:
- Documenting Türkiye’s intellectual history of economic thought,
- Demonstrating responsible and innovative use of AI in academic research,
- Establishing an openly accessible scholarly database of Turkish economic literature,
- Offering a replicable model for AI-assisted historical scholarship in non-Western contexts.
Upon project completion, the data, essays, tools, and visualisations will be made fully open-access to support research, teaching, and reuse.
All code and data will be released under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license unless otherwise stated.