EAJS Conference Grant Program in Jewish Studies
Report
The Value of the Digital. #DHJewish Conference and Hackathon Potsdam, April 10-12, 2024
Authors of this Report: Daniel Burckhardt, Miriam Rürup, Gerben Zaagsma, Nina Zellerhoff
Event rationale and reflection on its goals
The second international DHJewish conference and hackathon, entitled The Value of the Digital, was organized by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies together with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). The Hackathon was co-organized by the Network Digital Humanities, Potsdam. Both the Moses Mendelssohn Center with the flagship project „Jewish History Online“ (https://portal.juedische-geschichte-online.net/) as well as the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) with the website „#DHJewish“ (https://dhjewish.org/) developped portals on Jewish history and Jewish studies.
This conference follows in a series of conferences since 2013 that took place initially in Hamburg at the Institute for the History of the German Jews in 2013, 2020 at the C2DH Luxemburg and in 2022 at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam, addressing the specificities of Digital Humanities (DH) approaches within the field of Jewish Studies. It is furthermore also based on a successful earlier DH Jewish-hackathon in Potsdam, for which we partnered with the Potsdam Network of Digital Humanities for the first time and organized the “Henriette Herz-Hackathon“ (https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/digital-humanities/aktivitaeten/henriette-herz- hackathons/dhjewish-hackathon)
The aim of this conference now was to critically (re)assess the value(s) of the Digital for the field of Jewish Studies as it has been developed and discussed over the past ten years. The question of the “value of the past” is playing an increasingly important role in societal self-understanding. The digital plays a paradoxical dual role in such debates: On the one hand, new media have massively facilitated the dissemination of fake news. On the other hand, they have enabled memory institutions to present their rich collections for the first time to a much wider audience than their traditional on-site visitors. Such shifts to the digital, therefore, have profound implications on questions of evidence and factuality that need to be addressed in both research and outreach.
During the two-day conference, we set out to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of the Digital in general and for the field of Jewish Studies in particular, as they manifest in all phases of research and dissemination from collecting and exploring to constructing and communicating. To do so, the conference focused on four key aspects of the digital turn in Jewish Studies specifically: the digitized, the reconstructed/deconstructed, the re-enacted, and the shared and co-constructed past. We also wanted to have a practical component to the event, building on the success of the previous three- day DHJewish hackathon that took place in Potsdam in September 2022. Building on that success of establishing an international network of DH scholars, we organized a one-day hackathon before the conference, with the intention to act as an incubator for new projects and facilitate the creation of new networks.
The goals of the event, both the conference and the hackathon, were very much achieved with a group of international scholars from countries including Israel, the US, France and the Czech Republic gathering in Potsdam between 10-12 April. During the hackathon, around 30 participants worked with great energy and enthusiasm on four very different projects. Meanwhile, the key aim of the conference, to look at the DHJewish field retrospectively (assessing what has worked well so far, and which promises have and have not yet been fulfilled) as well as prospectively (highlighting new directions that are being pursued), was realized through five panels and a closing roundtable discussion.
Overview of the hackathon and sections/papers presented during the
After a short welcome and introduction on the first day, the various challenges that participants proposed for the hackathon were introduced: Sinai Rusinek (University of Haifa) and Yael Netzer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) introduced their project entitled “The Matchmaker”, which addressed the challenge of interlinking data records relating to the same person, organization and places. The project “Holocaust Testimonies as a Language Corpus”, under the guidance of Isuri Anuradha (University of Wolverhampton and Lancaster University), dealt with Named Entity Recognition in Holocaust-related eyewitness interviews. Ilia Uchitel (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena) offered a project entitled “How to pinpoint the difference between Soviet, Stalinist and non- Soviet Yiddish press – with no sweat?”, which examined, among other things, pattern recognition in the naming of years (and dates) in the Soviet Yiddish press. The fourth project by Benjamin Schnabel (J.C. Senckenberg University Library, Frankfurt a.M. / University of Applied Sciences Mannheim), entitled “Finding quotes from rabbinical sources in historical texts”, aimed to identify direct and indirect quotes as well as paraphrases from rabbinical literature in the journals of the Compact Memory using Large Language Models.
Participants worked on these four projects throughout Wednesday and presented the results on Thursday morning before the start of the actual conference.
During the first conference day, three panels took place. The first panel The Digitized Past: Early Texts was moderated by Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and focused primarily on analyzing the content of early texts. The panel began with Moshe Lavee (University of Haifa) and his presentation entitled Data Modeling for a Critical Digital Library: Late Antiquity Rabbinic Homiletics in which he emphasized in particular the complexity of Tanhuma Yelammedenu Literature and how to cope with the challenges involved in modeling and representing it in a digital library. The presentation was prepared together with Hadar Miller, Shimon Fogel and Eliezer Baumgarten (University of Haifa). Nicolas Bontemps, with second authorship by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (both Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), presented a paper on Biblical Citations in Rabbinic Compositions: An Evaluation of Dicta’s Citation Finder and a New Proposal, evaluating the Citation Finder tool, developed by the Israeli Center for Text Analysis (DICTA) to identify various kinds of text reuse across all types of Hebrew texts as well as a custom trained model that overcomes some of the weaknesses. Nati Ben-Gigi gave the final presentation of this panel entitled Citation Network Construction and Analysis for Inter-Community Relationships and Viewpoint Plurality Assessment of the Medieval Rabbinic Literature. He presented a citation network construction for the analysis of large-scale corpus of Medieval Rabbinic literature, which he developed in collaboration with Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Binyamin Katzoff (all Bar Ilan University) and Jonathan Schler (Holon Institute of Technology).
The second panel of the day, also entitled The Digitized Past, was moderated by Yael Netzer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) about the topic: Analyzing Texts. Ophir Münz-Manor (The Open University of Israel) opened the panel with a timely and highly relevant paper: (Large) Language Models and the Future of Digital Jewish Studies. His overview was followed by Orel Sharp (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main) whose paper Stylometric Analysis and Close Reading of Mapu‘s „AYIT ZAVUA“ focused on the interaction and interplay between distant and close reading. Ilia Uchitel (Friedrich Schiller University Jena) subsequently discussed his project Soviet Yiddish Press as a Mirror of Soviet National Policies: Making Use of Newspapers’ Bibliographical and Textual Data in which he examines bibliographic data and OCR text data from a selection of Yiddish newspapers published in the USSR. Adia Mendelson-Maoz (The Open University of Israel) who worked together with Avi Shmidman (Bar Ilan University), then presented A Computational Analysis of Gender in 20th Century Israeli Prose, in which she showed how computational analysis can highlight trends in Israeli prose and help in understanding questions about gender in Hebrew writing.
The last panel of the day, The Reconstructed Past: Cultural Heritage, was moderated by Daniel Burckhardt (Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam). The first contribution by Inna Kizhner (University of Haifa) and Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet (Bar Ilan University), entitled Approaching a Multiperspectival Ontology of Jewish Cultural Heritage: Ontological Gaps and Epistemic Injustice, focused on ontological gaps in the representation of Jewish cultural heritage and outlined a methodology for building a multi-perspectival ontology of Jewish cultural heritage for material and visual culture. Viktoria Brüggemann, Mark-Jan Bludau, and Marian Dörk (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam) then discussed Granularities of Dispersion and Materiality (GraDiM): Visualizing a Photo Archive about Diaspora in their presentation of working with DH tools in a virtual photo archive by Frédéric Brenner on the subject Diaspora. The final paper of the panel by Daniel Baránek (Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences) dealt with Spatial Dynamics of Jewish Society: Insights from Historical Big Data. Baránek presented a spatial DH project using local historical big data of Jewish society in the Habsburg monarchy to map the development of Jewish settlements beyond the confinements of the Ghetto.
The second day of the conference began with the panel The Digitized Past, which was moderated by Gerben Zaagsma (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History). This panel was dedicated entirely to Jewish Music. Danielle Stein (University of California, Los Angeles) presented her research and analysis of Jewish lullaby’s under the title Gendered Voices of Home and Hopes for Tomorrow: Examining the Recorded Lullaby in Jewish Émigré Life through the Database of Recorded Jewish Music. In his presentation on Immigration and the Sound of American Jewry: How the Immigration Act of 1924 Affected the Production of Commercial Jewish Music Recordings , Jeff Janeczko (Milken Archive) then focused on an analysis of the production of commercial Jewish music recordings in the US in the 1920s. Mark Kligman (UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music) closed the panel with a paper on The Frequent Sounds of Sacred Jewish Music in which he showed the versatility of recorded Jewish Music in America using the example “Kol Nidre”.
The next panel, entitled The Remembered Past: Testimonies and Ego Documents, was moderated by Nina Zellerhoff (Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam). In her presentation A (Re)constructed Life? The Application “Tell me, Inge…” between Holocaust Education and the Preservation of a Life, Tabea Henn (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) presented the XR-experience “Tell me, Inge…” co-developed by StoryFile and Meta and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of this application from an oral history perspective. Anastasia Glazanova (Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People) then presented her digital archival work in Thematic Tagging in Zemelah.online Digital Archive of Soviet-Era Jewish Egodocuments with a critical reflection on the further development. For this she worked together with Galina
Zelenina (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow). Finally, Yael Netzer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) introduced the audience to the topic of setting up the oral history memory site Edut710 created in the wake of the October 7th attack on Southern Israel using DH methods, in her paper Emergent Voices: Applying DH methods in a Digital Archive of Testimonies during War Time.
In the afternoon, participants both on site and through Zoom presented their projects and research topics to the audience in a virtual poster session. The following posters were offered:
- Yiftach Ashkenazi (The Open University of Israel): Digital Sleuthing in Hebrew Literature: Unmasking Brenner and Binyamin’s Collaborative Echoes
- Aaron Christianson (FID Jüdische Studien/Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt (Main)): Revrit
- Eyal Gruss: BaRoshYitbare
- Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): Reconstructing the Deconstructed: Towards a Database of the Babylonian Talmud Stories
The conference concluded with a roundtable entitled “DHJewish Quo Vadis?” which focused on the current state and future directions in the field of Digital Humanities in Jewish Studies. The participants Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Anna Menny (Institute for the History of German Jews, Hamburg), Miriam Rürup (Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam), Sinai Rusinek (University of Haifa) and Gerben Zaagsma (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) opened the floor for a lively discussion with all conference participants with their initial statements in a round table format.
A summary highlighting the most significant and productive threads in the papers and
The main aim of the conference to critically (re)assess the value of the digital for the field of Jewish Studies, following the developments and discussions of the last ten years, was definitely fulfilled. A recurring subject during the conference was the computational analysis of text whereas the very timely, and topical, subject of Large Language Models was always present. At the same time, several papers moved beyond traditional textual sources by focusing on heritage and museum catalogue data, photography, maps, music, testimony, and ego documents. We can thus observe a shift to include broader forms and categories of cultural heritage in DHJewish research. The potential of integrating a variety of media was well illustrated in the Jewish music panel which centered on a recording database and the discussion quickly turned to combining such data with economic data, sheet music, and indeed music itself.
Compared to previous conferences, there was comparatively little discussion of the specific obstacles to the use of the Digital in Jewish Studies, namely the multilingual, multiscriptual and multidisciplinary character of the field, as well as the very wide range of sources, both temporally – from the oldest biblical texts to the 20th century novel – and geographically, from the Russian Empire to South America – and from text to image to music and objects. While not everything is solved, there is a remarkable consolidation of standards, tools and methods that allow us to deal with very heterogeneous sources. The hackathon challenge of finding quotations across different languages gave a first glimpse of Large Language Models with their ability to hand a variety of languages in parallel.
Such groundwork laid, discussions shifted from finding optimal solutions to productively combining different approaches. In the digital realm we can, for example, present the “abstract species” and the “concrete individual” of a text in parallel. For larger corpora, close or distant reading gives way to scalable reading, where one constantly zooms in and out from the entire corpus to individual sentences. The same is true for a photo archive, where the goal is to both honor the individual artwork, while at the same time give an overview of the photographer’s entire life’s work. When working with collections and data sets, both “big and messy” as well as “small and clean” can lead to valuable insights. Similar observations could be made for machine learning models: large commercial solutions have become amazingly or even frighteningly good on a wide range of applications, but for specific questions, custom-trained models can still outperform them.
The term DHJewish continues to serve as a productive umbrella. It has brought and kept together people from different countries working in very different fields, but with enough in common to benefit from presenting and discussing their work with each other. This is rare, both in “classical” academia and in the broad field of the Digital Humanities, where it seems much more difficult to bring together – for example – literary scholars and historians without the kit of a common interest in the “Jewish”.
An important observation that finally emerged, was the integration of DH in university curricula. This might not be specific to the field of Jewish Studies, but is certainly not less of a challenge.
Outcomes
A conference report to be distributed through H-Soz-Kult (https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/page?language=en) is currently in preparation. The conference showed that there is a great need for further academic events and meetings of this kind. The foundation for European-Israeli cooperation has been deepened and we foresee a continuation of the conference/hackathon projects. One possible outcome is the institutionalization of DHJewish in North America: Alison Joseph – who participated in the first DHJewish hackathon in Potsdam – is working with Mark Kligman to establish a digital humanities pilot department within AJS. An upcoming publication is still to be discussed. We certainly helped to create an international network of DHJewish scholars and maybe even “activists” that already at the closing round asked for the next conference discussing, for example, questions like how to include DH in our teaching of Jewish studies and how to use our DH expertise and tools for example in current conflicts that call for means to save Jewish heritage – both in oral history archives as well as in historical archives and manifest remnants or sites of Jewish heritage that are endangered by neglect or by crises such as war(s). We plan on a next workshop in two years time addressing these questions among others, including a hackathon as a practical way to enter into intense and more general discussions.
Final programme
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
8:30-9:00 Arrival
9:00-9:30 Welcome and Presentation of the Challenges
9:30 Start Hackathon
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 Brief Presentation of the Interim Status of the Challenges
14:00 Continuation of the Hackathon (open end)
Thursday, April 11, 2024
8:30-9:00 Arrival
9:00-10:15 Presentations of the Hackathon Results 10:15-10:45 Coffee break
10:45-12:15 The Digitized Past: Early Texts [Chair: Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky]
- Moshe Lavee, Hadar Miller, Shimon Fogel, Eliezer Baumgarten (University of Haifa): Data Modeling for a Critical Digital Library: Late Antiquity Rabbinic Homiletics
- Nicolas Bontemps, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris): Biblical Citations in Rabbinic Compositions: An Evaluation of Dicta’s Citation Finder and a New Proposal
- Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Binyamin Katzoff, Jonathan Schler, Nati Ben-Gigi (Bar Ilan University / Holon Institute of Technology): Citation Network Construction and Analysis for Inter-Community Relationships and Viewpoint Plurality Assessment of the Medieval Rabbinic Literature
12:15-13:30 Lunch break
13:30-15:30 The Digitized Past: Analyzing Texts [Chair: Yael Netzer]
- Ophir Münz-Manor (The Open University of Israel): (Large) Language Models and the Future of Digital Jewish Studies
- Orel Sharp (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main): Stylometric Analysis and Close Reading of Mapu’s “AYIT ẔAVUA”: Tension and Completion
- Ilia Uchitel (Friedrich Schiller University Jena): Soviet Yiddish Press as a Mirror of Soviet National Policies: Making Use of Newspapers’ Bibliographical and Textual Data
- Adia Mendelson-Maoz (The Open University of Israel), Avi Shmidman (Bar Ilan University): A Computational Analysis of Gender in 20th Century Israeli Prose
15:30-16:00 Coffee break
16:00-17:30 The Reconstructed Past: Cultural Heritage [Chair: Daniel Burckhardt]
- Inna Kizhner (University of Haifa), Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet (Bar Ilan University): Approaching a Multiperspectival Ontology of Jewish Cultural Heritage: Ontological Gaps and Epistemic Injustice
- Viktoria Brüggemann, Mark-Jan Bludau, Marian Dörk (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam): Granularities of Dispersion and Materiality (GraDiM): Visualizing a Photo Archive about Diaspora
- Daniel Baránek (Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences): Spatial Dynamics of Jewish Society: Insights from Historical Big Data
Friday, April 12, 2024
8:30-9:00 Arrival
9:00-10:30 The Digitized Past: Jewish Music [Chair: Gerben Zaagsma]
- Danielle Stein (University of California, Los Angeles): Gendered Voices of Home and Hopes for Tomorrow: Examining the Recorded Lullaby in Jewish Émigré Life through the Database of Recorded Jewish Music
- Jeff Janeczko (Milken Archive): Immigration and the Sound of American Jewry: How the Immigration Act of 1924 Affected the Production of Commercial Jewish Music Recordings
- Mark Kligman (UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music): The Frequent Sounds of Sacred Jewish Music
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 The Remembered Past: Testimonies and Ego Documents [Chair: Nina Zellerhoff]
- Tabea Henn (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich): A (Re)constructed Life? The Application “Tell me, Inge…” between Holocaust Education and the Preservation of a Life
- Anastasia Glazanova (Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People), Galina Zelenina (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow): Thematic Tagging in Zemelah.online Digital Archive of Soviet-Era Jewish Egodocuments
- Renana Keydar, Keren Shuster, Yael Netzer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Emergent Voices: Applying DH methods in a Digital Archive of Testimonies during War Time
12:30-13:30 Lunch break
13:30-14:00 Virtual Poster Presentation
14:00-14:30 Poster Discussion (Break-out Rooms)
14:30-15:30 Roundtable: DHJewish Quo Vadis? [Chair: Daniel Burckhardt]
- Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
- Anna Menny (Institute for the History of German Jews, Hamburg)
- Miriam Rürup (Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam)
- Sinai Rusinek (University of Haifa)
- Gerben Zaagsma (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History)