Workshop: Imag(in)ing Materiality

Imag(in)ing Materiality. German-Jewish Archives in the Digital Age

Jewish history and German-Jewish history in the modern era all the more so is shaped by the experience of – oftentimes forced – migration. Writers, scholars and thinkers have migrated and so have their papers – but not necessarily at the same times or to the same places. Researchers of German-Jewish intellectual history and culture are constantly faced with the challenge of globally dispersed archives and collections. A challenge, that might partly be overcome by means of digital access to the respective artefacts.

Based on the results of a joint digitization project with the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem encompassing 24 German-Jewish archives and collections from the 19th and 20th century with a total of more than 700,000 pages, this workshop seeks to explore the academic benefits and challenges of large-scale digitization with a particular focus on materiality. It thus constitutes a hands-on, critical evaluation of the promises of digital humanities. With individual case studies on the recently digitized archives by international scholars the workshop will address questions like: What are the scholarly advantages of digital access compared to accessing the physical ar-chive, what are possible disadvantages and blind spots, i.e.: What is lost and what is found in digitization? What kind of new questions and arguments can be introduced into the scholarly discourse? Which modes of international collaboration can be established? What are the (tech-nical, institutional, intellectual, legal) preconditions for working with digital representations? How do we handle large amounts of digital data in a productive and sustainable way? How can digitization projects creating massive cultural collections reach beyond the academic realm?

Please register via the link below ('Webseite der Veranstaltung')