Ataturk and the Republic of Turkey is a digital archive that helps preserve newspapers that came out and were relevant to the events of the Turkish war of independence and how Kemal and the formation of the republic affect Erdogan and his political actions today. The archive is mainly a collection of news articles with a few internal documents for the time and short descriptions.
The website is a digital archive that has many newspapers listed during the Turkish war of independence. It begins by talking about the current situation and how Mustafa Kemal wasn’t happy with the terms and how it was documented. Then it showcases the beginning of the war and how it looked impossible for the time and the mood from the general public towards the war. And finally, it ends with the formation of the republic and how Kemal affects Turkey today.
The Archive is useful for finding primary sources related to the war and how it affects today; however, it does a poor job at presenting the information as the beginning of the website talks about the process they went through researching the article rather than presenting the information they found. The photos are tiny and you need to zoom in to be able to read the headlines. The information given for these newspapers are nice as they give some context and background to the war but other newspapers only have a sentence to explain them. The archive helps scholars that are researching the Kemal and his effects on the current political establishment today by providing the newspapers and giving some information but it fails at presentation of information. For example: an interview between Atatürk and John Clayton in The Daily Telegraph. There’s a photo of a telegram that is very small along with a sentence to explain the screen shot. While the information and image of the newspaper is helpful as a primary source, the presentation could be improved on by giving more information and increasing the size of the image.
The Daily Telegram: Ataturk and the Republic of Turkey
While the presentation of the site is lacking due to the small images and the short amount of text under some photos, There are multiple photos with information that provide enough information for the topic and gives evidence for what is going on. For example there is a message that was decrypted and preserved as evidence that talks about the civil war and how greeks were found in Smyrna. The image is readable and the information given is enough context to understand that during the Turkish war of Independence, the Turkish army was looking for Greeks.
The digital archive is brief on its information and holds newspapers that were printed during the Turkish war of independence and how it affected those during the day while also talking about how the formation affects Erdogan and current politics. The Archive’s photos are small and hard to read while the information is very brief. However, the information that it does provide is enough to get their point and the archive’s purpose is to hold onto photos of the newspapers and properly sort them for historians and students that need access to the photos. While the interface and the content provided could use updates, the digital archive accomplishes its job to preserve the newspapers.