Project Details
Projekt
Data on Jewish individuals in the 15th and 16th centuries: computational modelling and analysis
Applicants
Dr. Christoph Cluse; Professor Dr. Christof Schöch
Subject Area
Early Modern History
Medieval History
Medieval History
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517713369
Jewish history in the 15th and 16th centuries, the period envisaged by the Reseach Gruop, was highly dynamic. Jewish life-worlds were not only reshaped by outside factors, though. All individual projects work from the insight that Jewish agents were involved in the processes, and focus on their mobility and migration, their relationships within the community and with agents of the surrounding Christian spheres. Prosopography is a method of choice, therefore, and it is favoured by the fact that during this period the Jewish minority, still relatively small in numbers, is reflected in a growing corpus of surviving documents. Individual relationships with other agents and networks of relations can be traced. Moreover, there is good reason to assume that some Jewish agents come into view in different regional settings, researched by different individual projects, which is why the Research Group works with a common database environment (FuD). These potentials cannot be fully exploited, however, since reconstructing a ‘person’ and their various movements and relationships from the disparity of documents remains problematic. On the technical side, this problem is paralleled by the lack of adequate tools in the Digital Humanities for reconstructing a ‘person’ and its profile, as the common ontologies turn out to be under-complex. The case of Jewish onomastics in the 15th and 16th century (and in the premodern age generally) provides particular challenges, resulting not only from the high levels of migration among Jewish agents, linguistic diversity, and the lack of scribal norms, but especially from Jewish practices of parallel naming (‘sacred’ and colloquial names, varying sobriquets). Jewish onomastics thus offers a test case for the Digital Humanities. The project addresses the problem of modelling pre-modern Jewish personal data. Its approach rests on a systematic distinction in the data model between ‘references’ (i.e., names given in the sources) and the reconstructed ‘person’. Its primary aim is to develop such a model, to implement it and to provide the Research Group with a user-friendly tool. The data model must both meet the international standards of the Digital Humanities and offer a useful extension of existing ontologies. In the longer term, the project aims at analyzing existing personal data in view of their network embeddedness and to develop an algorithm heuristics that will support users in reconstructing personal profiles from a multitude of references. Providing a more granular model for personal data, this individual project makes significant contributions both to the Digital Humanities in general as well as to reconstructing Jewish life-worlds in premodern times.
DFG Programme
Research Units
