#DayOfDH2020: DHJewish Projects
Happy #DayOfDH2020! This annual event brings together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, what we’re working on, and the rhythm of our life during DH.
Last week, we shared some of our current and legacy projects from JudaicaDH at the Penn Libraries. This week, we want to share some great work happening in the #DHJewish field at large. First and foremost, h/t to Michelle Chesner for the #DHJewish hashtag! She started aggregating sites as #DHJewish which culminated in a 2017 article for Judaica Librarianship, “JS/DH: An Introduction to Jewish Studies/ Digital Humanities Resources.”
Haifa University hosted a floating meetup on Digital Jewish Studies early in the day, featuring presentations on the DiJeSt project, topic modeling the Eichmann trial, The Prenumerantean Project, a visualization tool for annotated (poetic) text, and more on DH pedagogy.
Mapping Projects
Entering Cartographies: Meditations on Travel is a digital mapping project centered on Marjorie Agosín’s Cartographies: Meditations on Travel (2004), and stems from larger questions posed by the Venice Ghetto Working Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The StoryMap Journal tackles space and memory to think through themes of exile, displacement, national belonging, and exclusion.
From a multidisciplinary team at the University of Michigan, Mapping Modern Jewish Cultures helps users examine the confluence between cafés, the urban environment, and the creativity of multilingual Jewish communities. Explore all cafés or consider how culture traveled between urban centers like Vienna, Odessa, Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York City.
Mapping Jewish Charleston at the Special Collections of College of Charleston Libraries explores the Jewish presence in the city over three centuries using images and texts from their archives.
This tool from HaMapah features Hebrew-character place names and corresponding Latin-character name and location. Elli Fischer mentioned on Twitter that the tool will have a massive update in the next few weeks, with c. 8,000 additional place name variants. Check it out on the HaMapah blog.
Manuscripts
Tikkoun Sofrim (@ElijahLab) is a joint French Israeli project aimed at making Medieval Hebrew manuscripts openly and freely available as texts. In its first stage, the team is training computer algorithms to recognize handwritten text by crowdsourcing transcription.
You probably already know about Sefaria, but did you know you can export structured Jewish texts and metadata with free public licenses from their database?
Footprints(@footprints_heb) is a projected hosted by Columbia University Libraries and co-directed by Adam Shear, Joshua Teplitsky, Michelle Chesner, and Marjorie Lehman. This database traces the history and movement of Jewish books since the inception of print.
Museums
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has produced many digital projects, including
- The History Unfolded project, which asks students, teachers, and history buffs throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded.
- Their digital humanities associate fellow worked on a data visualization mapping American newspaper coverage from History Unfolded, as well as other projects applying digital tools to Holocaust research.
The Jewish Museum has many cool digital resources, but their audio tours are fantastic. (They were recently nominated for a Webby award!)
Exhibits and Community Projects
The University of Nevada-Las Vegas Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project is a gateway for primary sources about the local Jewish community’s experience.
Memories/Motifs, build in Scalar, explores representations of Holocaust survivors in the postwar period. Users can listen to postwar radio broadcasts about the Holocaust, watch fundraising videos, and see images from magazines and newspapers that introduced American audiences to the Holocaust in the wake of the war.
Stitching History from the Holocaust is a cool collaboration bringing together the UW-Milwaukee Libraries, the UW-Milwaukee Digital Humanities Lab, and the Jewish Museum Milwaukee for an exhibit on designer Hedy Strnad.
The Bais Yaakov Project is dedicated to the collection, preservation, and digitization of historical material related to the Bais Yaakov movement from its founding in 1917 through today.
Projects and Resources
The University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library is home to the Detroit Jewish News Digital Archive, a free searchable database containing more than 100 years of digital copies of the Detroit Jewish Chronicle and the Detroit Jewish News.
The Digital Yiddish Theatre Project is a research consortium dedicated to the application of digital humanities tools and methods to the study of Yiddish theatre
There are so many projects from the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, ranging from Sephardic lighthouses to online cookbooks!
Simon Rabinovitch shared how exploring Boston’s Jewish history with his students led him to create a new @HistoryDept_NU course in digital history, Digital History of the Jews of Boston, with help from @NUlabTMN and @NortheasternLib
@LadinoLinguist and @BingULibraries have built Documenting Judeo-Spanish, an awesome project for resources to learn Solitreo, document, and reclaim this style of writing.
DiJest has worked to contribute to digital Jewish Studies by preparing data resources, adapting tools to the languages and domains of Jewish Studies.
@YiddishBookCtr has a Digital Yiddish Library & other collections for your perusal.
Looking for Jewish newspapers? The @OSULibrary has your back!
