The EAJS Digital Forum has organised two panels at the EAJS Congress (2018):

0.8 EAJS Digital Forum
0.8.I/II Session I: Humanities in the Mirror: Writing Jewish History in a Digital Key
Monday, 16 July, 17.00-19.00
JU Auditorium Maximum, Krupnicza 33, Exhibition Hall, room 2

This panel aims to discuss the meta questions and to consider the implications of DH methods for our perspective on Jewish history. One of the most promising aspects of DH is the concept of big data, which enables us to study and analyze vast corpora of texts. This panel wishes to address the question whether DH corpora and methods will enable us to find a new common ground in the field of Jewish history, which nowadays is characterized by national, regional and local specializations, specific thematic angles and, to greater and lesser extents, a fragmentation of the historical image. Will DH enable us to develop a broader grasp of Jewish history, without returning to the normative reductionism and structuring ideologies of Graetz, Baron and Dubnow, and without losing the subtle potential of post-modern binaries and other productive recent categories?

One of the main topics this panel will address is if and how DH will further enable us to study continuity (in all its complexity), the average, the ‘standard’ and ‘norm’ in Jewish culture. The possibility to study ‘big data’ may open new possibilities to trace long-term processes, continuities and developing ‘normativities’ on a systematic scale. With history generally concentrating on change, this ‘average turn’ may have its implications: can we perhaps begin to rethink such well-worn oppositions as tradition versus modernity, process versus decision making, and to fundamentally reconsider historical categories like periodization, spatiality, mis en intrigue, agency, etc.?

Organized as an interactive ‘think tank’ rather than a series of papers, this panel wants to open the debate on what Jewish historiography might look like when we start writing it in a digital key.

Chair: Andrea Schatz (King’s College London, UK).

1. Introduction:​ Irene Zwiep (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Bart Wallet (University of Amsterdam, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
2. Responses and presentations of digital strategies by Thomas Kollatz (Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut Duisburg/Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz), Gerben Zaagsma (Université de Luxembourg), Ophir Manor-Münz (Open University of Israel), Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (Universität Hamburg), Evelien Chayes (Université de Bordeaux), Anna de Wilde (Radboud University Nijmegen), Ruth Peeters (University of Amsterdam), Avriel Bar-Levav (Open University of Israel) and Miriam Rurup (Universität Hamburg)
3. Discussion

0.8 EAJS Digital Forum
0.8.I/II Session II: New Philologies: Hebrew Manuscript and Print Cultures in a Digital Key
Monday, 16 July, 14.30-16.00
JU Auditorium Maximum, Krupnicza 33, Exhibition Hall, room 1

Recent years have seen a resurgent interest in critical philologies, with numerous new conceptual approaches addressing their potential to elucidate text cultures, their languages and their social and political contexts in widely conceived vertical or horizontal frameworks (such as “deep time” or “world literature”). This new interest in the future of philology is partially linked to the new technical and analytical possibilities offered by the Digital Humanities. This panel pursues two aims: it will invite participants to reflect on promises as well as issues that these new developments raise for Jewish Studies in terms of concepts and methods, and it will provide a forum for all those with projects in progress or project ideas that combine philological and digital approaches to discuss research directions, practical questions and opportunities for cooperation and exchange. Options for developing a systematic and academically driven approach to improving OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for Hebrew scripts will form a further practical focus.

Chair: Professor Irene E. Zwiep (Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands)

1. Introduction:
   New Philologies: Hebrew Manuscript and Print Cultures in a Digital Key
   Dr Andrea Schatz
2. Presentation:
   New Approaches to Editions with Digital and Computational Means: The eRabbinica Mishnah
   Professor Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, École Pratique des Hautes Études (with Hayim Lapin, University of Maryland)

Technological developments have the potential for changing the way we access, publish, and study rabbinic texts. We report on several areas in which our overlapping projects make use of these new opportunities. Computational approaches, and in particularly the application of neural networks to handwriting recognition, permit the automatic transcription and linguistic enrichment  of the text of Medieval Hebrew manuscripts from images, in relatively little time and human effort with reasonably few errors (the Sofer Mahir project). Algorithms for comparing and aligning texts allow for born-digital collation of variants for critical editions (as in our editions of the Mishnah), as well as synoptic editions of related texts (as in our Mishnah/Tosefta project). Digital technologies and increasingly advanced web interfaces make it possible to display carefully produced data from many angles, e.g. textual criticism, linguistics, intertextuality or history in an interactive way, as well as to analyze visualize the results of analysis in the browser. Finally, common standards make it possible to share our data with and make use of tools developed for other projects (specifically the mounting of rabbinic texts to Perseus under their developing CTS standard).

3. Discussion:

New Philologies & Critical Editions: Projects in Progress & Project Ideas

Professor Sarah Pearce (ex officio) (EAJS Secretary)
Ian Karten Professor of Ancient Jewish Studies, and Head of the School of Humanities, at the University of Southampton
Website: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/history/about/staff/sjp2.page

Dr Andrea Schatz
Reader in Jewish Studies, King’s College London
Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/andrea-schatz
Email: andrea.schatz@kcl.ac.uk

Professor Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra
Directeur des études, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Website: https://www.ephe.fr/ecole/nos-enseignants-chercheurs/daniel-stokl-ben-ezra
Email: Daniel.Stoekl@ephe.psl.eu

Professor François Guesnet
Reader in Modern Jewish History, UCL, London.
Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/people/academic-staff/dr-francois-guesnet

Professor Marcin Wodziński
Professor of Jewish History and Literature, and Head of the Department of Jewish Studies, at the University of Wrocław
Website: http://judaistyka.en.uni.wroc.pl/department-of-jewish-studies/people/faculty-and-staff/marcin-wodzinski/
Email: marcin.wodzinski@uwr.edu.pl

Thomas Kollatz
Website: http://www.adwmainz.de/mitarbeiterinnen/profil/drs-thomas-kollatz.html
Email: thomas.kollatz@adwmainz.de

Dr Bart Wallet
Assistant Professor of Jewish History at the University of Amsterdam and at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Websites: https://www.uva.nl/profiel/w/a/b.t.wallet/b.t.wallet.html?1577975671708 and https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/bt-wallet
Email: B.T.Wallet@uva.nl

EAJS Digital Forum

The EAJS Digital Forum is anchored in, and takes inspiration from, the diverse and dynamic world of Jewish Studies in Europe. It offers support to European scholars and digital initiatives, seeks to foster teaching and training as well as methodological reflection and debate, and, in doing so, aims to facilitate productive links between Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities. The Forum’s outlook is international, and it will cooperate, in particular, with the digital projects of the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS) and the National Library of Israel (NLI).

The EAJS Digital Forum has been established

• to facilitate contact among Jewish Studies scholars with an interest in the Digital Humanities (DH), and to support their cooperation with DH scholars, librarians, archivists and curators to open up new avenues for research
• to offer support for all kinds of applications aiming to combine research questions in the field of Jewish Studies with research methods of the Digital Humanities
• to foster critical methodological reflection
• to  support short training courses, workshops, and summer schools on topics at the intersection between Jewish Studies and the DH
• to support PhDs and supervision of joint DH-Jewish Studies projects
• to explore how the DH in Jewish Studies can lead to innovative teaching, including new MA courses/modules and degree programmes
• to support the development of teaching aids
• to offer support and guidance to departments and individual scholars with regard to peer review and research evaluation of digital scholarship in Jewish Studies (for hiring, promotion, tenure and research exercises)
• to facilitate contact and exchange with other academic associations, such as the AJS, WCJS, ADHO and AHA
• to explore how the DH in Jewish Studies can shape the interaction between academics and the broader public.

The Steering Committee welcomes inquiries, ideas and suggestions from all EAJS members.

Links:

EAJS Digital Forum Steering Committee

EAJS Digital Forum Advisory Board

EAJS Digital Forum and the EAJS Congress 2018

EAJS Roundtable: ‘Turning the Page: Jewish Print Cultures & Digital Humanities’ 

Digital Humanities Resources