Jews have long been the People of the Book. But as computers replace books and possibly libraries, museums, and universities, will they soon be the People of the Byte? If so, what will happen to their understanding of their history? These were the questions raised by a recent two-day conference at the Center for Jewish History titled "From Access to Integration." At the sessions, librarians, archivists, and scholars explored the cutting edge of the Jewish digital world. They outlined the immense technical challenges involved in creating databases for scholarly and public use and described the digitization projects that are steadily surmounting these challenges. They also addressed the puzzle of "integration," which may be harder to solve.
It is astonishing to see how far technology has come in making Jewish information available. Tasks that are impossible for the human eye to perform—like reuniting the hundreds of thousands of dispersed fragments of the Cairo Genizah in New York, Cambridge, and elsewhere—are being done by computer algorithms. The diversity of Jewish sound—hazzanut, Israeli folk songs, Borscht Belt comedy routines, Torah chanting from Lithuania to Morocco—can be preserved and disseminated to anyone in the world with a computer. Jewish newspapers from Israel and Arab countries, Ottoman-era photographs of the Holy Land, and archives of Jewish communities living and dead, especially documentation of the vast life of European Jewry—all of these are or will soon be available.
Read Full Article »