Signatures of Friendship
Exploring the Jerusalem Guestbook of Miryam and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl (1927–1966)
The Jerusalem home of the artist couple Miryam and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl was a place of cross-cultural gatherings, intellectual encounters and artistic events. From the time they emigrated from Vienna to Mandatory Palestine in 1927 and until the husband’s death in 1965 the two dedicated hosts kept a guestbook which recorded – in many forms and languages – hundreds of visitors. Today, it is held in the Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl Archive at the National Library of Israel.
The digital edition of the guestbook is part of the research project ‘A Fresh Look. Visualising Digitised German-Jewish Archives’. It is based on material from the digitisation of 24 personal archives and collections of 19th and 20th century German-Jewish intellectuals, which was carried out in 2021–2022 in cooperation with the National Library of Israel. It also draws on the results of the accompanying research project ‘Wandering Artefacts. The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’.
As an exemplary use case, the digital edition of the guestbook combines two open-source viewers, each offering a different visual experience, different interaction options and thus a different perspective on the same material. The canvas view is powered by VIKUS Viewer, the full-page view uses OpenSeadragon. The initial segmentation of the entries was done using Recogito.