An Inspiration

Hi dear digital humanists, I am Sena, a PhD student in Sociology and a proud member of Praxis Fellowship’s 2026-2027 cohort! I should start by stating that I feel pretty brave by being part of this program, as someone who is a complete beginner in digital methods (and not very advanced in technology overall) but very excited to practice and learn.

I work on the contemporary art made by Kurdish artists. This brings about an obligation: following so many artists on Instagram! Therefore, I keep seeing artists posting about their inspirations from the art worlds, photos of exciting objects in their studios, or just regular, day-to-day things that motivate them to make art. I decided to follow a similar route in this first post I write for Praxis blog and wanted to write about a digital humanities project that was inspiring to me years ago, even before I knew about UVA or Praxis Fellowship.

When I was writing my MA thesis about the memorialization of state crimes in Turkey, I came across a website called Memorialize Turkey. This is a website that brings together a collection of memorialization projects prepared by civil society initiatives which work on coming to terms with the difficult pasts in Turkey.

The creators define the project as an attempt to highlight the examples of memorialization related work which focuses on the violation of human rights in the last 100 years, in late Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey. In the beginning, their main aim was to show how all these projects can come together and help create an alternative and more democratic understanding of the recent history of Turkey, where the official history is dominated by nationalistic and one-dimensional narratives - which I am sure is the case almost everywhere.

This website was fascinating to me when I first saw it. It was a singular project itself, but at the same time an archive of many other incredible projects. All of these other projects were also aiming to create their own archives regarding specific events or time periods in Turkey with an alternative perspective to knowledge and history. Their methods varied a lot: there are books, documentaries, museums, memory walks and cultural heritage projects listed in Memorialize Turkey. Even though my thesis focused only on a couple of these projects rather than covering all of them, I learned a lot from all of these projects, and Memorialize Turkey was a great guide for me to structure my work.

Now being part of Praxis fellowship, I remember my excitement about the Memorialize Turkey website and can see more clearly how digital methods can be used to make knowledge more accessible to a greater public. It is very exciting for me to think about the possibilities of creating a digital space that is more public-facing to make our academic production more visible to a bigger audience. I believe, Praxis fellowship will be an amazing experience to think, learn and create ways of making my -and my cohort members’- work recognized by many others!