Data, Diaspora, and Discovery: A Digital Reconstruction of Jewish Families in the Americas before 1900

Using various Judaica collections from Penn Libraries as well as external archival sources, this project reconstructs a broad network of Jewish families living in the Western Hemisphere prior to 1900. The presentation will detail the creative workflow behind data and will demonstrate how the resulting dataset enables new forms of analysis within Jewish history and digital humanities, from migration mapping to network visualization.

About the speakers

Laura Newman Eckstein is the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Curator of Judaica Digital Humanities at Penn Libraries. Laura is also currently a PhD candidate in the Penn history department. Her studies focus on the Jewish press in the mid-nineteenth century United States with specific interests in business history, material culture, and digital humanities methodologies. In her role at Penn Libraries, Eckstein has led a range of Judaica Digital Humanities initiatives. She received a grant from Zooniverse for Scribes of the Cairo Geniza, a crowdsourcing project that teaches participants how to sort and read fragments from the Cairo Geniza. She has also created data models for multiple Judaica collections at Penn and partner institutions, developed workflows for digitization and metadata creation, and collaborated on projects that broaden public access to Jewish material texts and archives.