Bibliographic record
Abstract
Operating at the intersections of diplomacy, the Ottoman Empire and Europe, and the Muslim and non-Muslim communities in Istanbul, the Pisanis were a prolific family of dragomans with many members employed by the British Embassy in Istanbul in the nineteenth century. These non-Muslim interpreters and translators were intermediaries who facilitated diplomatic relations between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, and acted as brokers that bridged two worlds. Apart from the world of diplomacy, the Pisanis were a well-connected family whose members excelled in Istanbul’s Levantine community, and participated in a wide range of enterprises. But by virtue of family members’ occupation as dragomans, extra-territorial legal protection gained by their employment at the embassy, and membership in the Levantine community, the Pisanis, and dragomans in general, are often considered to be actors that were “in-between” empires. This dissertation revises that narrative and argues that the Pisanis were anything but in-between empires, and were rather firmly embedded in both the Ottoman Empire and British Empire. To do so, this study reconstructs their family history and social networks, their public activities in their roles as dragomans and their private activities as non-Muslim Ottoman subjects to examine how members of this family operated within Ottoman and British imperial spaces. In discussing the lives of the Pisanis, this dissertation intervenes in scholarly debates on non-Muslims living and operating in the Ottoman Empire by providing insight from the bottom up on the opportunities provided for this family, and what they did with them. It charts the tactics used to conserve their position in the embassy, the difference in self-representations of their identity among family members, and their use of British and Ottoman institutions to shape their lives within these empires.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".