JS/DH: Primary Sources and Open Data

Column on digital humanities and Jewish Studies, focusing on open data in digitized material

Building the Foundations of Scholarship at Home: Salo Baron and the Judaica Collections at Columbia University Libraries

Salo Baron’s impact on Judaic scholarship in the 20th century is hardly unknown. Moreover, his leadership of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Project solidly places him in the annals of the history of bibliography as well. Less well-known, however, is the outsized impact Baron had on the collections at his home institution. In this chapter, I will discuss how Salo Baron’s connections and advocacy for the Judaica collections at Columbia University ensured its place as a top primary source collection of Judaica in the United States

JS/DH: An Introduction to Jewish Studies/ Digital Humanities Resources

An introduction and overview of a new column which will review projects at the intersection of digital humanities and Jewish Studie

Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place is a database and research project designed to trace books-in-motion. It brings together acts of careful individual research with large-scale quantification and mapping: using inscriptions, owner’s marks, and catalogues of copies of early Jewish printed books. The project is a cooperative endeavor of four project directors, both faculty and librarian, from different institutions each representing different fields of Jewish Studies. With the technical expertise of partners at a university-based center for teaching and learning, a mix of paid and volunteer student, post-doctoral, and library based researchers, the project directors have created a database that is transforming the way research on the history of the book is done. The chapter will address collaboration in three aspects: between project directors; between the project and its contributors (individual and institutional, public and private); and between contributors and users. The chapter argues for a new model of iterative projects that relies in part on networked collaboration rather than only on operations in concert by a small, bounded group

Footprints: A New Approach to (Jewish) Book HIstory

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era) and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. Footprints undertakes two concurrent and more open-ended aims: (1) the on-going assemblage of a dataset about post-print mobility based on evidence other than the printed text (e.g. marginalia, catalog records, archival letters, other printed texts); and (2) the creation and iterative refining of a scholarly instrument to analyze the dataset through computational methods and modes of representation

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place--Data 2021.10.01

This dataset comes from Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. Data includes provenance data (names, dates, locations) related to editions (title, publication date, publication place, standard identifier) of specific works (title, author) and related notes. The hierarchy for the dataset is composed of "footprints" which are found in "copies" of "imprints" of "literary works," with "footprint being the most specific data point and "literary work" being the most general. Wherever possible, the standard identifier for imprints is the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book. Downloaded on October 1, 2021

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place--Data 2021.04.01

This dataset comes from Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. Data includes provenance data (names, dates, locations) related to editions (title, publication date, publication place, standard identifier) of specific works (title, author) and related notes. The hierarchy for the dataset is composed of "footprints" which are found in "copies" of "imprints" of "literary works," with "footprint being the most specific data point and "literary work" being the most general. Wherever possible, the standard identifier for imprints is the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book. Downloaded on April 1, 2021

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place--Data 2018.07.27

This dataset comes from Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. Data includes provenance data (names, dates, locations) related to editions (title, publication date, publication place, standard identifier) of specific works (title, author) and related notes. The hierarchy for the dataset is composed of "footprints" which are found in "copies" of "imprints" of "literary works," with "footprint being the most specific data point and "literary work" being the most general. Wherever possible, the standard identifier for imprints is the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book. Downloaded on July 27, 2018