I’d like to have a quick brainstorming session to collect (and share) ideas about the specific aspects of Digital Humanities that pertain to Jewish Studies. Are there any, or do they all fold under the general scope of the humanities?

I am interested at taking a hard look at content-specific resources; content-specific challenges (how relevant content is presented online); relevant practices and methodologies; language (and script) matters; instructional uses of social media; etc.

I have become increasingly interested in three interrelated areas: 1) employing digital technologies in the classroom (iPads and Prezis); 2) utilizing digital spaces to open collaborative research projects (Comment Press); and 3) examining technology as a medium.  The relations among these three areas is somewhat obscure to me, but I sense an underlying concern with representation and exposure: how do particular technologies mediate content?  Using iPads in the classroom, for example, alters social dynamics even as it sustains a more vibrant syllabus—the technology mediates content in a way that both limits and expands.  Comment Press (a plugin for the popular WordPress blog platform) can support interactive collaborative work, but it enforces a form of navigation that I find both liberating and confining.  All this is to say that while I employ digital technologies to enhance my teaching and research, I am also increasingly aware of those technologies as digital mediums that represent images and texts in fascinating and frustrating ways.  I would like to think more about technology as a medium and the kinds of literacies we require to be more reflective users of it.

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?