Browse all of our current and legacy projects, from digital tools to online exhibits.
Received in November of 2012, the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica continues to grow, currently consisting of over 13,000 items. It is the most important private collection of its kind, documenting the social and economic development of early Jewish life in the Western Hemisphere. The core of the Kaplan Collection covers the period before mass Jewish migration to the Americas in the late 1880s.
An international initiative to integrate digital technologies into the way we study early American Jewry. Its primary goal is to create an open access digital repository or “genizah” of physically dispersed primary sources that document the development of Jewish life in the Western hemisphere from the 16th-19th centuries.
Thanks to a start-up grant from the Gershwind-Bennett Families, we are transcribing and scanning the correspondence of 19th century Orthodox Jewish teacher, scholar, and publisher Isaac Leeser.
This Omeka bibliographic database draws from Robert Singerman’s Judaica Americana, a bibliography chronicling American Jewish book production until 1900.
This project provides digital access to the writings and correspondence of Sabato Morais. His personal papers and publications, in turn, point researchers to primary sources that document the development of observant Jewish life in the broad context of Victorian culture on both sides of the Atlantic during the 19th century.
Scribes of the Cairo Geniza was a multilingual crowdsourcing project to classify and transcribe fragments of medieval and premodern manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza. With an in-kind grant from the Zooniverse, the largest crowdsourcing platform in the world, along with partners from the Penn Libraries, the Princeton Geniza Lab, the e-Lijah Lab, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the Cairo Genizah at the University of Haifa, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library, The University of Manchester Library, and The Bodleian Libraries at University of Oxford, we sought to harness the power of technology to decipher some of the most difficult-to-read fragments in the world.
Building on a exhibition of early photographs of the Holy Land, this project experimented with a Python script to find a way to use facial recognition to comb a corpus of more than 5,000 images to bring to life the otherwise lost individual faces found in these photos.
This extensive illustrated manuscript takes us on a tour through the Holy Land, as it was known, at the end of the 17th century. It describes many sites of Biblical significance, including Damascus and the grave of Mary, and documents the geography, cartography, flora, fauna, history, economy, ethnicities, and languages of the region.
A project using the Arnold and Dean Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica to explore how to work with data from Colenda, the Penn Libraries digital repository.
Digitization of the personal scrapbook of newspaper clippings, pamphlets, circulars, and typescripts belonging to Sabato Morais, a Sephardic Jewish leader, Hebraist, poet, historian, lecturer, and teacher.