Digital Humanities Showcase Report

Key Documents of German-Jewish History

Dr Anna Menny, project leader and coordinator of the Key Documents, Institute for the History of the German Jews

Christopher Steinbiß, student assistant, Institute for the History of the German Jews.

With more than 200 sources ranging from personal documents as letters and journals to three-dimensional models of historic synagogue buildings, the online source edition “Key Documents of German-Jewish history” presents a variety of material focused on Hamburg’s Jewish history from the early modern period to the present. The Hanseatic city is at the same time considered as a lens for larger developments as it stands for peculiarities within the developments in its 400-year long Jewish history, such as the living-together of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. Hamburg’s Jewish history is considered in a national, transnational, and global context. Beyond their significance for local history, the sources are meant to “open doors” to understanding broader developments and questions in (German-)Jewish history. Edited and coordinated by the Institute for the History of the German Jews (Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, IGdJ), the edition first went online in September 2016. It has been funded by the DFG until January 2021.

As Hamburg’s Jewish heritage has been scattered all over the world due to migration and persecution, the source edition aims to digitally reconnect key components of this heritage. The online source edition provides its material in the form of a digital facsimile of the source accompanied by a transcript and an interpretive text. Users may navigate the website in a variety of ways. One can explore the different topics of Jewish history in Hamburg, ranging from demographics and social structures to religion and identity. Every thematic category is presented with an introductory article and a list showing relevant sources (Key Documents). Additionally, a map as well as a timeline are provided to navigate the collection. Besides the different ways of discovering sources, the Key documents also provide a multitude of advanced formats such as online exhibitions, dossiers, city tours, and materials for educators. The different formats aim to open new perspectives on important research questions and topics of (Hamburg’s) Jewish history and at the same time (re)arrange the source material in order to make larger contexts visible. The entire edition is bilingual and available in German as well as English.

By presenting previously little studied sources and putting familiar archival documents in new context and formats, new impulses for study and research are to be encouraged. The transcripts are tagged according to the Text Encoding Initiative based on the format TEI P5 (“Base Format” of the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA-Basisformat, DTABf)) in their basic structure (such as document type, pages, paragraphs, headlines) and annotated with norm data for names, places, organizations or historical epochs according to the Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei, GDN) or the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). Special terms are explained by glossary entries. The transcripts themselves apply to the guidelines of a “documentary edition,” which means that they are presented as original and as exactly as possible. All sources are accompanied by interpretation texts which base their arguments directly on the sources and thus make larger questions comprehensible by means of a concrete example.

Additional information is given by linking to further online offers of the IGdJ or between different entries within the Key Documents edition as well as by the Linked Data Service and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek’s (DNB) Entityfacts service. Through SeeAlso-services dynamically connected content by third party providers such as biographical articles in the Allgemeine and Neue Deutsche Biografie (ADB/NDB) or relevant estates, manuscripts, and print publications catalogued by Kalliope and library networks can be tagged.

Considering different levels of knowledge and of in-depth analysis is all the more necessary since the target audience of the source edition consists of students, researchers, and teachers, as well as the interested public and high school students.

Almost all sources found in the edition can be downloaded for research and private purposes. Also, the institute provides its source code for other projects via Github.

Thanks to close cooperation between the publishers and the authors of the interpretation texts, no source is left uncontextualized. The plurality of authors with different interests and thematic emphases guarantees that new research trends and questions are reflected within the edition. The project is ever evolving and keen to grow the collection and improve user experience.

The Key Documents of German-Jewish History can be accessed by the following link: https://jewish-history-online.net/. For actual development and news, you can follow us on Twitter:  @keydocuments. Proposals for new contributions or requests for further information can be made via E-Mail: info@juedische-geschichte-online-net

Figure 1:  Header of the online edition “Key Documents of German-Jewish History”

Figure 2:  Digital presentation and tagging of the source material

Digital Humanities Showcase Report

Dutch Elite Jews, the Dutch Biography Portal and Nodegoat

The Dutch Biography Portal or BioPort, hosted by the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam, Netherlands, holds biographies from over 25 biographical dictionaries and datasets. Together, they contain information on more than 80,500 deceased prominent figures with a connection to the Netherlands or its former colonies. Among them are hundreds of Jews.

The Dutch Biography Portal homepage. Left: Jewish entrepreneur and politician Aron van Dam (1881-1942).

Although biographies collected by the Jewish Cultural Quarter used to be incorporated in BioPort (unfortunately, the current urls are dead), and the Jewish Biographical Dictionary will hopefully be a part of it in the near future, BioPort, in essence, is not the obvious source for looking at Jewish history. However, for my PhD project, in which I research how Jewish members of the Dutch elite seized novel opportunities and dealt with challenges with regard to integration between 1870 and 1940, the ‘prominence’ of Jews in BioPort makes them a suitable proxy for Dutch elite Jews during this period.

To be able to analyse the lives of around 730 individuals born between 1850 and 1920 in a systematic way, I use humanities tool Nodegoat, developed by LAB1100. Nodegoat is an online, free, object-oriented database tool that allows researchers to build their own data model and filter, visualise, and analyse information through networks, time and space. The tool has an accessible interface and very useful features that keep on being updated, such as a GIS-functionality and the possibility to download data in CSV, JSON, XML or ODT formats. LAB1100 offers excellent introductory workshops for Nodegoat, and a paid version of the tool is available for larger research teams in need of regular support. Its popularity is steadily increasing, and whereas Nodegoat is particularly appropriate for network analysis, I would also like to emphasise its efficiency in serving as a digital repository for large quantities of data – on people, but also on other entities (‘objects’ in Nodegoat), such as manuscripts, buildings or organisations.

Nodegoat serves as a modern sort of card index, enabling me to flip easily through my data and sort information quickly and accurately. In doing so, it is possible to see at a glance which (sometimes unexpected) topics deserve further inquiry. This is also very useful for my three case studies: Jewish women in the women’s movement, Jews in the Dutch East Indies and Jewish country house owners (in close collaboration with the Jewish Country Houses project). These case studies concern around 30 ‘BioPort people’ and their families each. With Nodegoat, I am able to discern patterns in the lives of large and diverse groups, without losing sight of these people as individual actors.

Visualisation in Nodegoat of Zionist organisations (red nodes) and their BioPort members (blue nodes).

Manually building a database involves having control over all devised dimensions and variables, and requires researchers to be as specific as possible in what they want to know. In my view, Nodegoat is well suited for qualitative studies that include quantitative elements, like my own project. Not only does the tool provide a worthwhile means to store, filter, analyse and visualise data, at the same time it offers possibilities to verify scholarly notions, in this case about Jewish social mobility and integration, in a fresh way.

• Sietske van der Veen, PhD candidate at the Huygens Institute and Utrecht University

Digital Humanities Showcase Report: Footprints in Frankfurt: Tracing the Circulation of Early Hebrew Books

Dr Kerstin von der Krone, Head of Judaica Division, University Library Frankfurt am Main

(k.vonderkrone@ub.uni-frankfurt.de)

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu) is a database project that documents information on the circulation of Jewish books. Established in 2014 by Michelle Chesner, Majorie Lehmann, Adam Shear and Joshua Teplinsky Footprints brings together Jewish Studies scholars and dedicated librarians with a shared interest in Book History and Digital Humanities.

Image information: Footprints record for פלאן אונד איינריכטונג איינר הייאראטש גזעללשאפט
(Plan und Einrichtung einer Heiratsgesellschaft), Berlin 1776, Call number: Jud. Germ. 765. 

Footprints database (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/footprint/19594/)

The Footprints database records information on the circulation of individual copies of Jewish books from the inception of the printing press in the 15th century until ca. 1800. A footprint is defined (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/help/) as “a moment in time when we can place a book-copy in a particular place and/or with a particular person (an owner, a librarian, someone seeing the book, a giver, a subscriber, a censor [expurgator], etc.).“ Data is collected based on a defined set of evidence types and actors roles using controlled vocabularies. Footprint entries of a respective individual copy are linked to each other and to the work title.  The database integrates information from the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book (BHB, https://www.nli.org.il/en/research-and-teach/catalogs#hebrew). The BHB number serves as the permanent identifier. Footprints is an open source project (Github https://github.com/ccnmtl/footprints).

A key feature of the Footprints project are collaborations – with researchers and projects with shared interests in book history. In addition, Footprints has established collaborative projects with institutions that host significant collection of Jewish books. One of those projects Footprints in Frankfurt: Provenance of Early Hebraica in the University Library Frankfurt am Main aimed to survey Hebrew and Yiddish books from Frankfurt’s outstanding Judaica Division, the largest of its kind in Germany. Its significant historical holdings – manuscripts, incunabula, old prints – were gifted to the Stadtbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, the predecessor of the University Library, by Frankfurt Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From September 2019 to November 2020 Dr. Lucia Raspe as scholar in residence for Footprints in Frankfurt, supported by library staff, examined two distinct collections: the Hebrew Incunabula with 72 items and the Yiddish Prints prints collection with 626 items, and was able to identify and record more than 1.100 footprints. The project added a significant amount of data on Yiddish works and on footprint locations in German-speaking lands, including smaller places beyond the centers of Hebrew printing. Moreover, the collection of Yiddish Prints produced about 30 footprints from religious and literary works, most significantly Tze’ena uRe’ena Bibles and Yiddish prayer books, that give evidence of women as book owners and readers as well as benefactors. And finally, the project provided significant insights into the history of the Frankfurt collection, identifying former owners for about 60% of books surveyed. 

Adding new data with unique features something requires adjusting the database itself. Through Footprints in Frankfurt records on Yiddish works were to be added that are not listed in the BHB. Since creating the Footprints database the BHB number is used as the permanent identifier. An alternate identifier was needed and found in through the newly established Yiddish Union Catalogue of the National Library of Israel (https://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?search_scope=ULY&vid=ULY&lang=en_US&offset=0&fromRedirectFilter=true).

With Footprints in Frankfurt the University Library aimed as well to enrich catalog data on its old Hebraica with information on provenance and circulation. At the beginning of the project librarians created a spreadsheet combining the Footprints data model with additional data fields, i.e. to record authority data following German standards (GND, https://gnd.network/Webs/gnd/EN) and add a controlled vocabulary for provenance information used in Frankfurt. As part of the project, catalogue records for more than 700 Hebraica were revised and if necessary corrected. Adding Footprints data to the catalogue, however, required an additional processing step. Data of all footprints related to an individual title had to be compiled into one singly entry which is added to the respective catalog record as provenance information (“Details zum Vorbesitz“). This data field was the most practical way to add footprints data in accordance with local cataloguing regulations. However, footprints data reaches beyond provenance information and includes a broader spectrum of evidence types on the circulation of Jewish books.

Librarians at the University Libraries Judaica Division will continue to document footprints as part of their cataloguing routine, and create additional records for the footprints database.

Digital Forum Showcase Report: Epidat

Thomas Kollatz, Digital Academy, Mainz

Link: http://www.steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat?release=beta

Epidat, short for epigraphic database, is a research platform for Jewish funerary epigraphy. Currently, Epidat contains transcriptions, translations, descriptions, and iconographic documentation of 43,838 headstones (with 79,972 digital images) from 233 historical Jewish cemeteries, spanning a period of 900 years (1040-1952) and covering six European countries (Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Latvia and Czechia).

Headstones are a valuable source for Jewish history, religion, and culture. As a rule, each object is dated, because inscriptions always mention the date of death. In addition, the tombstone, which is preserved in a given cemetery, usually mentions the last place of residence of the deceased. Finally, the name of the deceased, the patronym and, in the case of married women, often also the name of the husband are given. In contrast to other historical sources, there is no ambiguity about the sex of the deceased. This characteristic of epigraphic data as well as their quantity allows the application of digital methods and procedures that facilitate the understanding of and access to the data.

Epidat offers research tools for analyzing and searching the ever-growing body of research data. One tool that can be used under different aspects is the Geo-Browser for the visualization of spatio-temporal relations provided by DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). Thus, all 37,943 dated personal data mentioned on epitaphs are visualized in the Geo-Browser. This allows genealogical queries, such as “Show me all mentions of the family name Rothschild” and displays the results on a map linked to a timeline, while providing information about the spatial and temporal distribution of the search query. Onomastic research questions can also be answered using this tool, such as the changing popularity of given names through time and space. The geo-browser for example reflects how the name ‘Kalonymos’, popular in the Middle Ages, declined in the early modern period against the short form ‘Kalman’, and then experienced a revival in the 19th century. This tool is also used to display the spatio-temporal distribution of symbols on gravestones as well as the inventory of books mentioned on headstones.

Numerous other access options are provided to the users: Full text search, search for a specific date (according to Julian, Gregorian, or Hebrew calendar), image indexes, word lists as CSV sorted alphabetically, by frequency, by gender (i.e. mentioned on a man’s or woman’s tombstone), among others.

The cemetery as a “cultural space” was the focus of a three-year interdisciplinary third-party funded project entitled “Relationen im Raum” (spatial relations). Here, the data collected on the individual headstone with regard to form and inscription, its date, and gender of the deceased, etc. were projected onto dynamic site maps. In this way, patterns of burial became visible, such as chronological burial, burial in family clusters, by function (rabbi), marital status (unmarried, child), manner of death (suicide, death in childbirth), etc.

Internally, the database offers web-based input forms for recording inscriptions, their annotation and formal description. This allows the asynchronous entering of data, and by several researchers simultaneously. A good example of this approach is the recording of the World Heritage Cemeteries Speyer, Worms, Mainz (Schum).  In this long-term project, the inscriptions, their transcription, dating, translation and annotation were recorded by an epigraphic team at the Steinheim Institute, while the formal description of the objects was carried out by art historians and monument conservators of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage Mainz.

All research data are made available under a Creative Commons license, which explicitly permits subsequent use by third parties. In addition, the research data are provided via open interfaces in machine-readable formats (EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML). This has allowed the inclusion of epigraphic data in the Places of German-Jewish History web app, the use of epidat data sets for the workshop Methods and Tools for visualizing Digital Humanities data sets, or the extraction and visualization of family relations from the Hamburg Altona gravestone corpus, to name a few examples.

Based on the above-mentioned epigraphic format EpiDoc, various epigraphic repositories from the field of Jewish studies were merged in the so-called Peace Portal (Portal of Epigraphy, Archaeology, Conservation and Education on Jewish Funerary Culture, see showcase: PeacePortal).

Epidat has been continuously developed since 2002. It is hosted at the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institute for German-Jewish History in Essen. Since March 2019 Epidat is jointly developed within a scientific cooperation between Steinheim-Institute and Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz.

Kollatz, Thomas. 2018. „EPIDAT. Research Platform for Jewish Epigraphy“. In Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy. From Practice to Discipline. Digital Epigraphy, 231–39. Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter open. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607208.

Digital Forum Showcase Report: eScriptorium

Professor Daniel Stoekl, Directeur d’Etudes at the EPHE (daniel.stoekl@ephe.psl.eu)

eScriptorium is an open source platform to automatically transcribe manuscripts, printed works or inscriptions. It is developed by members of the AOrOc laboratory at the EPHE, PSL in Paris France. It works particularly well on documents in Hebrew script, but in principle, eScriptorium is script- and language agnostic: It can be trained to cope with almost any script, language or document. Usually this process involves the creation of a verified data set to train artificial neural networks to adapt to a specific layout type, handwriting and / or printed font. This process is similar to training a cellphone to adapt to your voice / language so that you can dictate SMS.

Document layouts can differ vastly. A fragment of a Qumran scroll is quite different from a letter from the Genizah, from a medieval codex with a central text surrounded by commentaries or from a Biblical polyglot. A dictionary has little in common with a newspaper, a scientific edition of a text or a journal article. Also, different researchers use the same document in different ways: Some only want the main text. Others only want the marginal commentary. Therefore, the computer needs to be trained to understand their structure in the way you want it to analyse it.

Handwriting and printed fonts can be extremely different, too. We are particularly advanced with regard to Hebrew script of medieval manuscripts where we have generalized models that perform well even without necessitating retraining for a new handwriting, including Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and other languages written in Hebrew script. The generalized models work out of the box for medieval manuscripts in Ashkenazy, Italian and Sephardic square scripts and for some printed types. And we are actively training new models for other script types and richer language coverage, in particular Oriental and the various semi-square and some cursive. Here, too, the computer can be trained to adapt to your transcription conventions, e.g. with regard to interpunctuation, ligatures, allographs.

Beyond the sheer possibility of mass transcription, the preservation of the link between text and image is essential for facsimile editions or paleographical studies. We have also used eScriptorium to align existing transcriptions with the images for paleographical purposes. You can also train the computer to cut out all illuminations, drawings or tables, etc. Among the many projects using eScriptorium on different objects and scripts, let us mention here HTR4PGP, Minhag Italia, openITI, Sofer Mahir, Tikkoun Sofrimm SQE on large amounts of handwritten and printed texts in Hebrew and Arabic scripts, Dead Sea and Genizah fragments, medieval codexes and books. E.g. The data created in Sinai Rusinek’s DiJest project has permitted us to train basic general        models for Hebrew print.

Creating the data for training require different amounts of time depending on the complexity of the dataset. We have used our creativity to develop an interface as simple and ergonomic as possible which is still capable to deal with simple and complex documents. Some of these videos may give you an impression. Basic descriptions can be found here and a different one here (in French). Real understanding of the process and the interface will in most cases require joining a life tutorial followed by hands-on practice to memorize buttons and mouse-movements. 

We are offering a first tutorial for EAJS members and their students on how to use eScriptorium specifically for Hebrew script on Friday, December 17, 2021, between 9 am and 1 pm CET (via zoom). A second will be offered on Thursday, January 13, 2022, between 9 am and 1 pm CET (also via zoom). A third will be offered on Thursday, February 3, 2022, between 12h30 pm and 4h30 pm. Places are limited so please sign up here.

Furthermore, during the next year we will also offer to run our instance of eScriptorium on Hebrew script manuscripts of your choice and give you back the rough automatic transcription with the possibility to correct it. Proposals can be made here (aiming for one manuscript per week). You need to either have the images on your system or provide a iiif-link. We prefer to begin with manuscripts with simple layout that have never been transcribed or manuscripts for which you already have an e-text.

Finally, we are also looking for people that would like to join efforts to deal with complex layout print documents to create open-source segmentation models. If you are interested, please contact Daniel Stoekl directly via email.

Unlike other automatic transcription platforms, our interface and AI code is fully open source. This makes it easy to integrate it into pipelines by other projects or to modify the code. eScriptorium’s code can be found here. We also have a blog with news, more videos and a list of publications. Anyone can install eScriptorium on a linux or MAC system to work on personal documents but it makes much more sense to install it on a server with gpus (to speed up training) and with a good internet connection (that allows collaborative work). eScriptorium is free of charge if you install it yourself or have access to a shared instance. There are now many running instances in the world, among others in Paris, Heidelberg, Geneva, Haifa, College Park (MD). We however have no connection to the British website www.escriptorium.co.uk.

We graciously acknowledge that our work has been funded generously by the Scripta-PSL, Resilience H2020 and Biblissima+ Equipex, openITI Mellon and LectauRep ANF-Inria projects as well as the DIM STCN of the Région Ile-de-France. Advancements on Hebrew script have been possible thanks to support by the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, the PHC Maimonide France-Israel, and Princeton University.