Triangulations is a multilingual research platform for exploring digitized books, maps, and print materials in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, and Hebrew. Designed for students, researchers, and anyone curious about the past, it brings together dispersed archival collections in a single searchable interface. By allowing users to search across scripts and access richly annotated records, Triangulations makes it easier to discover, compare, and trace connections across languages, regions, and time periods. The platform supports the study of histories that are often separated across archives, disciplines, and linguistic boundaries.

Users can move seamlessly from discovery to close reading. Each record features metadata-rich descriptions, direct downloads, and an integrated PDF viewer that allows materials to be consulted in their original form without leaving the platform. Rather than treating languages, collections, and historical regions as isolated silos, Triangulations enables users to follow texts, ideas, and visual cultures as they move across empires, communities, and print networks.

The name Triangulations reflects the platform's central idea: that recovering knowledge across time, language, and geography requires multiple points of reference. By triangulating texts, maps, and sources, the platform illuminates overlooked relationships and encourages both structured and exploratory research. Triangulations is not only a search engine, but also a tool for historical thinking.

Triangulations also opens new approaches of studying maps as historical objects: not only as records of place, but as volatile sites of performance and world-making. It makes visible how maps were shaped by translation, pedagogy, commerce, imperial administration, and communal knowledge production, while also allowing users to trace the networks of printers, publishers, cartographers, schools, missionaries, state institutions, and readers involved in their circulation. By bringing together materials from libraries, archives, and partner collections, Triangulations offers a connected lens on the modern Middle East and the many worlds that produced its texts and maps.

Whether conducting focused research or simply exploring, users are invited not only to find sources, but to think with them.

The Triangulators

Adrien Zakar, Merve Tekgürler, Lara Hovagimian, Umar Patel, Aws Dek Albab, Hafssa al-Rawi, Vané Hakobyan, Munib Syed, Nareg Tajirian, Maayan Rotberg, Ege Sayin, Liam Bakar, Sanzhar Shamsiyev, Sarp Egemen, David Barsamyan.