Team
This database is run by a small human team, who instruct it, verify it, and sign it. Several research agents assist that work under a written, versioned doctrine: they gather, compare and propose within that framework, never beyond it. Every published conclusion is reviewed, sample-audited, and approved by a named person before it enters the database.
The team
Thomas Issa
Founder and Research Infrastructure Director
Thomas Issa directs the Ottoman Holy Land Christian Communities Project and leads the site’s research infrastructure. His work focuses on the Christian communities of the Ottoman Holy Land between 1500 and 1800, an interest that stems in part from a direct descent from the sixteenth-century dragomans of Bethlehem: a motive for research, but also a discipline of method. Mentions concerning his own lineage, when they appear in the sources, are instructed under the same doctrine as any other family in the corpus, with no filter and no special treatment.
Munevver Esma Oztop
Ottoman palaeography
Munevver Esma Oztop is a palaeographer specialising in Ottoman Turkish (osmanlı). She reads and transcribes the corpus’s Ottoman sources, sijillat and defters, and carries out the palaeographic control of the fields drawn from them. Her work directly conditions the reliability of the published mentions drawn from the Ottoman judicial holdings.
The research instruments
Four research agents carry out part of the work under a written, versioned doctrine whose principles are published on the Method page. They are not researchers: they are instruments, comparable to a spectrometer or a sequencer in a hard-science laboratory, built to apply a method set by humans and nothing else. No agent publishes on its own: every output passes back through a named human check before it enters the database.
The agents carry first names borrowed from the very registers they serve, attested in the published corpus. These are not the names of team members, nor characters: every card pairs its first name with its exact role, without exception.
Hanna · transcription agent
Builds the database from the historical texts: transcription, indexing and structuring of records.
This agent turns registers, sijillat and defters into structured data, starting from transcriptions produced upstream. A field that appears misread is never silently corrected: it is flagged to the human verification log, and the file remains suspended until a person reopens the folio and rules it confirmed, corrected, or illegible.
Doctrine : transcription pipeline, control [F]
Human control : Every flagged field is settled by a person who reopens the folio, never by the agent itself.
Elias · identity reconciliation agent
Reconciles identities: links mentions that may name the same person.
Under an open doctrine, currently version 1.5.1, it instructs each file piece by piece: ruling out rival candidates, applying the constraint of chronology, and checking any kinship the record itself states. Across hundreds of thousands of mentions, it concludes on its own only within a strictly bounded scope, and raises weighted hypotheses, never conclusions, whenever the evidence falls short.
Doctrine : version 1.5.1
Human control : Every completed batch is audited by a documented random sample before publication; a single error found in the sample sends the entire batch back to instruction.
Catharina · event reference agent
Instructs major events: what happened, where, when, and to whom.
Under version 1.3.1 of its doctrine, it builds the reference set of historical events from independent clusters of sources, and links each person to an event under three distinct statuses: documented impact, probable exposure, contemporary context. It never concludes an identity, only a relation between a person and a fact.
Doctrine : version 1.3.1
Human control : Every event and every link remain in draft status until a named person validates it.
Barbara · economic data agent
Instructs economic data: prices, property and chains of ownership.
Under version 1.2 of its doctrine, it records every sum and every property exactly as the records state them, currency and unit verbatim, never converting to a modern currency or scale of value. A conversion is applied only if it relies on an attested table, established in advance.
Doctrine : version 1.2
Human control : Any monetary or calendar conversion table must be attested and signed by a person before it is applied to a single mention.
Safeguards shared by all four agents
Three rules apply to all four agents without exception: a written, versioned doctrine, where every rule carries a number and a date of human arbitration; a documented, reproducible random-sample audit before any batch is published; an automatic reopening of any conclusion as soon as a source it depends on is corrected. No conclusion is published without a chain of proof leading back to the folio that establishes it.
Method and citation
The full doctrine, its numbered rules and dated arbitrations, is published on the Method page. Any information drawn from this database is cited from the Cite page.