Discovery of Karamanlidika Cultural Artifacts via Social Media Tools: Towards a Digital Repository for Karamanli Memories

Abstract

The Karamanlides, also known as Karamanli people, are those who spoke Ottoman Turkish and wrote in Greek characters in Asia Minor during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The Karamanli Turkish community has been forced to leave the country in accord with the 1923 Mubadele. There are also evidences of records of Karamanlides found in rare book libraries and archives in Cyprus, Greece, Istanbul, and Anatoli. The first step of the research was to identify available digital Karamanlides cultural artifacts via social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube and pinpoint the useful metadata. The next step focused on the analysis of these user generated metadata. Findings suggested that these unique cultural artifacts have been scattered all over the WWW and lack descriptive metadata. The aim of this project is not just the discovery of Karamanlides artifacts, but also the reconnecting of people to their cultural heritage and lost memories via a digital platform. It is hoped that it will facilitate genealogy research among these dispersed people and common understanding of cultural heritage, common cities and shared countries such as Cyprus that remains divided. In this study, Karamanlidika Virtual Library will not be only a repository where Karamanlides artifacts stored, described, and retrieved but also an online collaborative working and meeting space for the descendants of Karamanli heritage exploring and documenting their family history.