Blog

My review of Jason Lustig's book A Time to Gather. Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture was published on H-Soz-u-Kult yesterday.

The Royal Historical Society's blog Historical Transactions is currently running a special blog series entitled Historical Research in the Digital Age on occasion of Ian Milligan’s new book, The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age (available as open access download).

I was asked to write a blog post on digital abundance from a global perspective, which was published here. 

I published version 1 of a dataset of known historical Yiddish newspapers and periodicals published in Germany, on Github and Zenodo. The list is based upon cataloguing and holding information from the libraries and book (listed in the readme file of the Github repository). The list is provided as an Excel sheet and is a work in progress.

Currently the list contains 227 items, 21 of which are available in digitised form. URLs for the digitised periodicals are provided; the list also provides holding locations for the other periodicals but no direct links to their online catalog records.

Any comments and additions are most welcome.

I am delighted to announce that our new book Jewish Studies in the Digital Age is out now, in open access. This new volume was edited by Michelle Margolis, Amalia S. Levi, Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra, Miriam Rürup and Gerben Zaagsma. 

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age contains an elaborate introduction that discusses the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities within its broader historical context. In four different sections (Collections, Spatiality, Text and Computational) 16 chapters subsequently analyse a broad range of topical, methological and epistemological issues. 

It is the fifth volume to appear in the book series Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics, published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg and edited by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH).  

Here is the book's abstract: 

My new article Digital History and the Politics of Digitization has just been published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 

Here is the abstract: 

My review of the book Fighters across frontiers. Transnational resistance in Europe, 1936-48 was published in the new issue of Francia-Recensio. 

The review can be found here.

I am very happy to announce the launch of the new website #DHJewish - Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities: dhjewish.org. 

The #DHJewish website offers a single access point to news, events and projects on the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities. It also provides an online community (powered by the open-source team collaboration tool Zulip) as well as a dedicated Zotero group library. Furthermore, we are building a directory of people.

After several years in the making, I am happy to announce the publication of the Handbook of Digital Public History with De Gruyter Oldenbourg, edited by Serge Noiret, Mark Tebeau and myself.

About the book

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.

I wrote a review of Adam Crymble's recent book Technology and the Historian. Transformations in the Digital Age, which seeks to chart the evolution of practicing digital history. The review was published on H-Soz-Kult.

For my new BA course on music and contemporary history I use Spotify for (collaborative) playlists. We started with an introduction on musicology, (global) music history and how historians have engaged and engage with music, followed by two contextual classes on functions, technologies and categorisations of music. In the remaining classes we will talk about intersections with politics, nationalism and nation building, class, youth culture, (post-)colonialism, migration, religion and gender.

I am very very happy to return to music & history since my MA thesis on Jewish instrumental music in the 1990s (‘klezmer’ nowadays) and I am educating myself as much as the students.

In addition to reading and listening, part of the (group) work for students will be to create and curate their own playlists about the main themes (I am aware of much of the valid criticism of Spotify from an artist point of view, but as a teaching tool it adds a dimension that would be difficult to add otherwise).

Edit 30 May 2021: the weekly classes have now ended, below is the complete set of playlists that we created during the course:

Music & History 1 - Introduction:

My playlist for the introductory class is intended to illustrate some of the big themes we will discuss in the course of the seminar. They relate to both the contextual topics (functions, technologies, categorisations) and the themes outlined above.

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