Bekir Kemal Ataman's Involvement in History

I had hated history during all my primary and secondary education because all we were taught were political history and all we were asked was to memorize dates and treaty clauses.

When I started attending the civil engineering program at Bogazici University I was asked to elect a humanity course, like all other students. So I chose History of Urbanization as the closest subject.

To my luck, our professor was an architect who had an MA in archaeology as well as one in History of Technology and a Ph. D. in History of Urbanization. Apart from his extensive knowledge in the subject, he was brilliant in teaching, too. I remember looking forward to his lectures and not missing a single lesson. His course was, also, my first introduction into what history is really about: Understanding the past to foresee the future. So, for the first time in my life, I realized history can have a meaning and that it can be fun, too.

At the end of the year, I came to think I would enjoy studying history more than anything else. So I transferred to the History Department to continue my undergraduate education and enjoy, I did; to such an extent that I went in for an MA in Ottoman Social History, after I received my BA in History.

During those years I had started planning a huge project to make an automated index of Ottoman court registers, the major source of Turkish social history. In devising a method for this, I was told I would need to learn archives administration. So that was I did next, at University College London, with full scholarship from Turkish Education Foundation. The subject of my MA thesis was my initial research project: Developing an automated indexing system for Ottoman court registers.

However, once introduced into archives and records management, I realized I have found my ideal job; for one thing it was about problem solving, which I enjoyed most, and second it was interdisciplinary by its very nature, just the right thing for someone with as varied interests as me. So, that is what I have been practising since then but I still enjoy reading something on history every now and then.