Digital Humanities for Recording and Representing the Multicultural Urban History of Balat, Istanbul (1894-1950)

In the recent years, the increasing interest to adapt digital humanities methodologies in the field of architectural and urban history activated unprecedented ways to investigate the past especially in terms of registering unofficial and/or less-emphasized aspects of history. These include scholarly efforts to create public history, confront contested pasts, document officially non-acknowledged monuments, generate projects of storytelling, etc. This paper will also use digital humanities methodologies for a visualization of multicultural past of the Balat district in the period from the 1984 great Istanbul earthquake until 1950. Utilizing Pervititch Insurance Maps, the 1946 Istanbul aerial photo, online newspaper archive of the Istanbul University, and various digital archives, the paper will illustrate the methodology of a map of multicultural urban history of Balat.