The legal system of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) produced a vast corpus of court records. Close readings of these records have long provided us with important insights into the legal, social, and economic history of the empire. A comprehensive, holistic examination of large-scale court record datasets promises even more nuanced perspectives. However, such analysis has remained largely impractical thus far, as the volume of material far exceeds what can reasonably be examined through manual, labor-intensive research methods.

This project aims to generate empirical insights from a large body of Ottoman court records using computational approaches. The first stage involves creating a structured dataset of Ottoman court records suitable for computational analysis. The second stage applies computational methods, including large language models, to systematically extract and analyze patterns, trends, and insights from the data.