© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15685209-12341517 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63 (2020) 505-554 brill.com/jesh Applying Digital Methods to the Study of a Late Ottoman City: A Social and Spatial Analysis of Political Partisanship in Gaza Yuval Ben-Bassat University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel yuval@research.haifa.ac.il Johann Buessow Ruhr University Bochum, Germany johann.buessow@rub.de Abstract This article takes the understudied Ottoman city of Gaza in southern Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century as a case study to illustrate the new possibilities available today to researchers of the Middle East by combining the study of historical sources with GIS and other digital technologies. It first surveys the main sources avail- able for the study of this city, some of which have only become available to researchers in recent years. It then describes the construction of a comprehensive database based on these sources and ways to run statistical analyses based on it. Finally, it presents the research results on maps and aerial photos connected to a GIS system. The case of Gaza can thus serve as a model for studying other cities in Ottoman Greater Syria and the Ottoman Empire in general. Keywords Ottoman Gaza – factionalism – Ottoman Census of 1905 – GIS – network analysis Introduction We are still in the experimental stage when it comes to using digital meth- ods to study the history of the modern Middle East. These methods have been