Dr Ahmet Kerim Gültekin represented the Alevi Encyclopedia at the workshop “Requirements Analysis in the Field of Multilinguality for Digital Research Infrastructures in the Historical Sciences.” His Problem Story has now been published on Zenodo.
On 22 April 2026, Dr Ahmet Kerim Gültekin took part in the workshop “Requirements Analysis in the Field of Multilinguality for Digital Research Infrastructures in the Historical Sciences,” organised in the framework of NFDI4Memory and Leipzig University.
In his contribution, Gültekin presented the Alevi Encyclopedia as a multilingual digital specialist archive and an open academic knowledge platform in the field of Alevi Studies. The presentation focused on the linguistic, technical and archival challenges of the project.
A central question in the discussion was how Alevi knowledge can be made visible and accessible in several languages. A large part of the material in the Alevi Encyclopedia is in Turkish. At the same time, many oral history interviews also include Kırmancki, Kurmancî and local religious terms. Kırmancki is especially important for the project because it is a highly endangered language and remains closely connected to local religious lifeworlds.
Gültekin emphasised that multilinguality is not only a matter of translation. It also concerns transcription, metadata, search systems, glossaries and the long-term preservation of oral traditions. Many emic concepts cannot simply be translated into German, English or Turkish without losing important layers of meaning.
The contribution shows why digital research infrastructures should make linguistic diversity visible rather than standardise or flatten it. This is particularly important for the Alevi Encyclopedia, which brings together academic knowledge, community-based knowledge and oral history materials.
The Problem Story was published on Zenodo on 3 July 2026 and is available at the following link:
https://zenodo.org/records/21158212
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21158212
DOI for all versions: 10.5281/zenodo.21158211
