I’ve taught many workshops on using Omeka, which is a tool for easily building online scholarly archives and exhibits, and I’d be more than happy to teach one or even two (Introduction and Advanced) workshops on it at THATCamp Jewish Studies. Here’s a couple examples of Omeka exhibits built at Denver University, one on the topic of “Pioneering Jewish Women of Colorado” and one on the topic of “The Loewenstein Family: A Story of Survival.”

Here’s a description (from an earlier workshop):

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable databases; and to create attractive, customizable web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects.

After 5 years of preparation, Leo Baeck Institute launched its digital archives, DigiBaeck, on October 16, to make fully accessible all of the documents and collections in the Archives pertaining to the German speaking Jewish world. I am curious to discuss and learn about possibilities of applying those holdings to the various branches of the educational field, how to reach out to different communities and to connect with similar or not so similar projects.

By digitizing the entire archive and not selectively prioritizing according to criteria of importance, the full spectrum of historical documentation can be explored and applied. In a world of constantly changing cultural paradigms, how do we anticipate usage of materials and exploration of topics? How can we recognize and integrate the needs of the different user constituencies?

I would like to propose a session in which THATCampers could discuss the relationship between Jewish Studies and recent debates about race and ethnicity in digital humanities.  I am particularly interested in talking about how certain platforms (digital archives, gaming, blogs, online genealogy sites, social media?) present either opportunities or pitfalls for thinking about the social construction of Jewishness.

On the positive side, I am curious about how digital humanities offers opportunities to discuss the boundaries of our discipline and who gets included and excluded from the rubric of “Jewish Studies.”  I mainly work, for example, on the Sephardic Diaspora in the Americas, so I tend to think about how scholarship can either reify or reject mythical views of authenticity of a “pure” Jewishness that is thought to have existed before the Sephardic displacement into the Americas or in medieval Iberia prior to forced conversions.  How might software (such as Omeka) that encourages visitor participation, for example, allow people visiting online archives to contest the definitions of either “Jews” or “Jewishness” in meaningful ways?  Likewise, how can we use online gaming to help raise questions about identity?  (Here I am thinking about games like Trading Races and AllLookSame.)  Does the digital world offer new ways to challenge students to think about the history of how Jews created their identities in relationship to and in dialogue with others?

I’d also like to talk about potential pitfalls of the digital world with respect to identity making.  To what extent extent are “charged assumptions” about race, ethnicity, or Jewishness replicated in either the digital world through systems, codes, or tools (See Koh Slide 31)?  How does digitizing Jews relate to larger debates about Race in the Digital Humanities and what it means to “digitize” race or ethnicity?