Ramazan Acun (Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey)

Career:

I graduated in History from the Hacettepe University, in Ankara in 1984. I obtained my M.A. degree in 1988 on the subject of "Computers in Historical Research, Methods and an Application: a Database for the Ottoman Pious Foundation Deeds". On the same year, I won a Turkish Higher Education Counsel Bursary to do my Ph.D. abroad. Following one year diploma course in software engineering in the computer science department at the University of Birmingham in the UK, I started to do my Ph.D. in the same department, which took me five years to complete. The title of my Ph.D. thesis is "Modelling and Retrieval of Historical Data". Here, I focused on the question of how to design and query the databases for the data with temporal and spatial (at the conceptual level) dimensions which come from multiple sources (documents). I considered the source as a new (third) dimension. Currently, I am a lecturer in the History Department at Hacettepe where I teach computing to arts students.

I am a Member of the Board of Directors of the Turkish Professional Association of the Literary and Scientific Work Owners. Here, I am responsible for the protection of the copyrights of the producers of software and electronic data.

Selected Publications:

R. Acun, R. Anane and S. Laflin "Database Design for Ottoman Tax Registers", in H. J. Marker and K. Pagh (eds.), Yesterday, Proceedings from the 6^th AHC International Conference, Odense 1994, pp. 109--122.

R. Acun, R. Anane and S. Laflin "User Interface Design for Historical Databases", in F. Bocchi and P. Denley (eds.), Storia & Multimedia, Proceedings from the Seventh International AHC Congress, Bologna 1994, pp.34--547.

R. Acun, R. Anane and S. Laflin "HiSQL: A front-end Query System for Historical Databases", Computers and the Humanities, 31 (1998), pp. 483-502

Acun, R. "Atatürk Bibliyografyası Projesi Veri tabanı" (A Database for Atatürk Bibliography Project), Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi Dergisi, 37 (1997), ss. 365-374.

Acun, R. "Bilim, Bilgi Teknolojisi ve Türkiye", (Science, Information Technology and Turkey), in: Milli Kültürler ve Küreselletme (Globalisation and National Cultures), Konya 1998. ss. 83-92.

Acun, R. "Internet ve Telif Hakları" (The Internet and Copyright Protection), Bilgi Dünyası, 1(2000), 29-37.

Ramazan Acun: Current Research

I am responsible for computing within two large state funded projects based in the Turkish Historical Society. I designed and implemented the databases currently being used in both of these projects. The projects are described briefly below.

The first project concerns the creation of an electronic inventory of immobile cultural objects in Turkey from ancient times to present. Several teams of experts consisting of art historians, historians and architects are on the field gathering information on every and each one of the objects that they can find such as historical buildings and grave stones using a provisional data collection standard. These data are then entered into a custom designed database capable of storing and manipulating multi-media data (i.e. data consisting of text, images, and video)

The other project aims to create an integrated database containing data from serial historical documents mainly from the Ottoman Empire, such as tax registers, court records and population censuses in order to do research on social and economic change in Turkey.

Thanks to the multi-dimensional data model employed during the design phase, these two databases can be inter-linked. The dimensions considered are time, space and source. This underlying multi-dimensional model allows the users to trace and compare the objects or entities over time, space, or sources from which information about them are taken. And the ability to link these two databases makes it possible to study an historical cultural object within the social and economic context in which it was created. Also, because of the database design is based on a multi-dimensional model, the structure of databases is flexible and open to further improvements in a dynamic way.

Current work in these projects involves implementing a GIS module in order to provide access to the databases concerned using a map interface.

Other research:

Ottoman Bibliography: This project aims the create a comprehensive bibliography of the works on the Ottoman Empire. I am the co-editor and the designer of the database created for this bibliography. The bibliography now contains over 35 000 items. It can be accessed via the Internet: http://www.obib.hacettepe.edu.tr (currently the interface is in Turkish, but I will soon implement an interface in English too).

The Internet Based Teaching of the Contemporary Turkish History: This research concerns how to organise the various collections of primary source material and the latest research related to the Contemporary Turkish History in pedagogically meaningful way and provide access through the Internet.

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