A Fresh Look

Visualising Digitised German-Jewish Archives

2024–2025

RFE22

For decades, the amount of digitally available archival resources has been constantly growing. Location-independent accessibility and preservation of the original materials by reduced physical handling are two key arguments for digitisation. However, the human capacity to process large amounts of visual information is limited. Scholars must rely on technology to present the available data in a way that is suitable and attractive for the human eye and encourages further investigation. The better the visualisation solution, the better (i.e. pleasant and productive) the browsing experience.

Based on this premise, the project draws material from the digitisation of 24 personal archives and collections of 19th and 20th century German-Jewish intellectuals that was undertaken in 2021–2022 in cooperation between UWA/CSMC and the National Library of Israel (NLI) as well as from the results of the accompanying research project ‘Wandering Artefacts. The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’ (RFE10). Since the total amount of available images is far too large and too complex to handle, the project focusses on three exemplary approaches from different angles:

A digital edition of a multilingual guestbook from 20th century Jerusalem
An online exhibition of selected, Hamburg-related documents from the NLI archives
A full digital representation of the archive of Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903).

The project is conducted in close cooperation with the Hub of Computing and Data Science and the Institute for the History of the German Jews.