DTCH Digital Turcologist Bootcamp: Evidence-First, Evaluation-First AI/ML for Under-Resourced Historical Turkic Languages and Cultural Heritage Data

DTCH Digital Turcologist Bootcamp Historical Turkic languages, including Ottoman Turkish, Old Uighur, and Chagatai, are vastly underrepresented in the AI world. Researchers in this field have lacked the shared benchmarks and documented datasets that make AI results comparable and reproducible. This 12-week online bootcamp addresses that directly, training 18–24 researchers, librarians, and heritage professionals to apply AI to historical manuscripts responsibly – building evidence packs, benchmark kits, and reproducible notebooks that anyone can verify. All materials will be published openly so communities working with other under-resourced historical languages can run the same program themselves.