The Thousand Words Project was created in 2023 under the umbrella of Digital Ottoman Projects. The project aims to reach the first thousand words of the Ottoman divans and explain the literary understanding, lifestyles, and world perception of the period to readers interested in the field.
The Thousand Words Project will use the natural language processing method to analyse divan poetry. There is currently no special vocabulary analysis prepared with computer technologies for a field such as divan poetry. In addition, there is no existing vocabulary that presents Turkish, Arabic and Persian words in the Ottoman language as a whole. There are no educational vocabularies that have been introduced to the scientific world by applying methods such as the European language teaching criteria used in language education in the production of words in divan poetry. Therefore, in order to solve these problems, a corpora covering 100 divans will be created covering a time period extending from the 13th century to the 19th century. The corpora will be subjected to text mining processes both as a whole and each collection individually. Then, the word frequencies and repetitions of each collection and the corpora as a whole will be determined. The data obtained will be brought to the scientific world by creating headings with explanations taken from various vocabulary works. Thus, the need for a holistic vocabulary centred on divans will be met with divan poetry vocabulary studies. The originality of the project is in the new digital methods it implements and the vocabulary works that comply with European language teaching criteria for the purpose of teaching divan poetry and in the outputs such as articles and papers it will produce.
The Divan of Fuzûlî was chosen as a sample for the project’s testing phase. One of the outputs of this phase will be an academic book that provides information about Divan poetry through the conceptual fields of the first thousand words in Fuzûlî’s Divan, and will also include a dictionary of the thousand most frequently repeated words in Fuzûlî’s Divan. Below are examples of collocations of the word “bezm,” one of the most frequently repeated words in Fuzûlî’s Divan. For various academic studies related to this phase of the project, please see the “Publications” section.
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