I’m , and I build websites for dictionaries, archives, and maps.
I work at the University of Chicago and on the Nişanyan dictionaries of Turkish, and I live in Brooklyn. Write to me at firat@firatciftci.com, or find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.
Fırat is Turkish for the Euphrates. Press my name to hear it, and follow the river down to my work.
Every Dog in New York
A map of all 96,459 licensed dogs in New York City, across its 197 neighborhoods. A license gives only the owner’s ZIP code, so I fit a model on the 2020 census to split each ZIP’s dogs among its neighborhoods, then went back through ten years of license files for four data stories. The dogs ride the subway, too.
Nişanyan Sözlük
The only etymological dictionary of Turkish, founded by the linguist Sevan Nişanyan. Since 2020, I have built and run the website, its iPhone and Android apps, and the panel its editors work in, along with the code that all nine Nişanyan sites share. With its sister sites, it draws about 40,000 readers a day.
Nişanyan Yeradları
The past and present names of 70,000 places in Turkey and its neighbors, with 77,000 older names in 34 languages. I built the whole site, along with the panel where researchers enter names and the map tiles it serves.
Nişanyan Adlar
The given names of Turkey, from 60 million civil registry records: 15,000 names in 130,000 spellings, mapped by province and district and charted by birth year. Look up Fırat and it tells you where the name comes from.
The Armenian Geography of Turkey
A Turkish translation of Sukias Eprigian’s Illustrated Homeland Dictionary, printed in Venice in 1902 and 1907. I put its villages on a map and linked every entry to the places it names.
OCHRE, at the University of Chicago
I lead the platform that turns records in OCHRE, the university’s research database, into websites for more than ten humanities and library projects, with faceted search, maps, timelines, and image viewers.
Ottoman Inscriptions
The writing on more than 1,100 Ottoman buildings in Turkey, Greece, and Egypt, in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, with transliterations and photographs. I designed and built the site and modeled its 1,200 inscriptions.
Cinemetrics
A database of film editing, measured shot by shot. I built its statistics, from each film’s average shot length to its trendlines, and the Chrome extension people measure films with.
Digital Publication for the Humanities
A graduate course I taught twice at the University of Chicago, to about 25 students each time. It starts with a plain HTML page and ends with a project in SvelteKit.
Smaller streams
Other things I made along the way.
- ochre-sdk ↗
The open-source TypeScript library under the OCHRE websites, downloaded more than 30,000 times last year. Rescoping its queries cut full-text search from 31 seconds to half a second.
- eslint-plugin-inline-utilities ↗
ESLint rules that keep utility classes on the element they style.
- artsumer.com ↗
The website of the .artSümer art gallery.