Mohamed Ilyes Mechentel is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies (ISNO), University of Bern, where his thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Serena Tolino, examines labour regimes in Algeria across the transition from Ottoman to French colonial rule, drawing on Ottoman court registers (sijillāt) and French colonial archives. Since February 2025 he has also been Research Associate and Digital Humanities specialist for the TraIL, MediMath, and The Flow projects at Bern, where his work centres on handwritten text recognition for Arabic-script and Ottoman manuscript collections and on coordinating collaborative transcription events (transcribathons) of judicial registers. His expertise sits at the intersection of Global Labour History, Islamic legal sources, and the HTR pipelines and lexical-database tools that turn large handwritten corpora into searchable research data. He holds a Master's in Digital Technologies Applied to History from the École nationale des chartes (Paris).