Reconstructing Ottoman Heritage through New Media: Digitalization, Virtual Museums, and Cultural Memory

This study examines the digital reconstruction of Ottoman cultural heritage within the context of new media, focusing on virtual museums and interactive digital platforms. Employing a comparative and theory-driven research design, the study analyzes three major digital heritage platforms operating at different scales: the Topkapı Palace Virtual Tour, Europeana, and Google Arts & Culture. The research is based on qualitative content analysis supported by descriptive quantitative indicators and covers the period between January 2024 and August 2025. Drawing on cultural memory theory, representation theory, and key new media approaches, the study explores how platform-specific digitization strategies, interface designs, metadata structures, and user interaction models shape the representation and circulation of Ottoman heritage in digital environments. The findings reveal significant differences across platforms in terms of visibility, accessibility, interactivity, and narrative framing, demonstrating that digital heritage platforms do not merely preserve cultural artifacts but actively reconstruct cultural memory through their technological and institutional logics. By offering one of the few comparative analyses of Ottoman cultural heritage across local, regional, and global digital platforms, this study contributes to the literature by proposing a replicable analytical framework for examining the mediation of cultural heritage in new media environments. This study aims to comparatively examine how Ottoman cultural heritage is represented, digitized, and circulated across local, regional, and global digital heritage platforms, and to reveal how platform-specific technological and institutional logics shape the reconstruction of cultural memory in new media environments.