The distributive decisions of the past, who funded which fountain in which neighborhood, where a school or hospital was placed, are legible in data that survives in tax registers, city plans, and archives. This course teaches the political economy of inequality through the specific, unusually rich case of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, as a hands-on data science course. The substantive core draws on Professor Cansunar's research into how the wealthy form preferences over taxation and redistribution; the technical core, led by Professor Pisan, gives students the tools to turn messy historical and spatial sources into analyzable data: OCR, geocoding, and geospatial analysis.
Theories of public goods provision and who provides them; setup of the Python and QGIS toolchain used all quarter.
OCR and digitization of historical registers; an introduction to geospatial analysis, joins, distance, and spatial aggregation.
Izmir and Ephesus, shared across all three courses.
Long-run effects of nation-building institutions; experiments on redistribution preferences; mapping inequality across Istanbul's neighborhoods.
Turning the quarter's work into a documented, rerunnable pipeline, presented publicly in Week 10.
The teaching data for this course uses real Istanbul district boundaries with synthetic records; Professor Cansunar may substitute a cleared archival extract from her own research once she has reviewed the pipeline. Readings and week-by-week detail are still being finalized between the two instructors.