Merve Tekgürler is a historian and digital humanist whose research bridges computational methods and early modern history. They are a PhD candidate in History and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Their dissertation, Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands in the Long 18th Century, investigates how news and information networks shaped imperial governance in the Ottoman-Polish borderlands during a period of geopolitical crisis. The project employs an interdisciplinary methodology that combines historical research with digital tools—including handwritten text recognition (HTR), natural language processing (NLP), and spatial analysis—to examine how borderland information practices transformed imperial epistemologies and impacted administrative reforms.
Merve develops NLP tools for Ottoman Turkish and is building a large corpus of manuscript news communiqués to support computational analysis. Their broader research spans into multilingual digital humanities, artificial intelligence, and machine translation. They recently published a paper on large language models and translation of historical languages in the ACL Anthology (https://aclanthology.org/2025.latechclfl-1.20/). Their forthcoming chapter on Ottoman Ukraine, Place, Space, and Anationalism, will appear in the Oxford University Press Handbook of Spatial Humanities.
Merve’s work has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship (AY 2023–24), the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).
