Digital Humanities
My work focuses on the convergence between movement, communication and space, and as such utilizes computational tools to generate a greater overview of the data that might be overlooked through a closer reading of the sources.
The primary tools and methods used in my research are:
- Geographic information system
- Social network analysis
- Corpus analysis, primarily topic modeling, stylometry and textual reuse.
- Optical character recognition
Current projects and grants:
- “Uniformity and Diversity in the US Press, 1841-1884: A Computational Analysis of Space, Time and Content” – Israel Science Foundation 1790/22 (2023-2026).
Digital scope: A spatial and network analysis of the US press based on patterns of topic modeling and textual reuse. - “Periodicals in Motion: The Hebrew Journalistic Networks in the second half of the 19th century” – The Open University Research Authority Grant 511669 (2020-2022).
Digital scope: A spatial and network analysis of patterns of textual reuse in 19th century Hebrew Journals. - Creating a digitized corpus of 19th century Hebrew journals – The Open University Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Center (2022).
Digital scope: Improving the OCR of an existing digitized corpus and incorporating the improved OCR with previously recognized layout analysis.
Books
(in chronological order)
Books Edited
(in chronological order)
– Zef Segal and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze, Motion in Maps, Maps in motion: Mapping Stories and Movement through the Time (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Open University Books
(in chronological order)
– Zef Segal and Nurit Melnik, Who’s Afraid of Numbers: Math and Computation for the Humanities (Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2022) (Hebrew).
– Zef Segal (ed.), Mobility, Communication, and Space in the 19th century: “Classic” and “Digital” Approaches to History (Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2019) (Hebrew).
Chapters In Collections
(in chronological order)
Printed:
– Zef Segal, , “Constructing the Modern Jewish ‘Present’: Time and Time Cycles in ‘HaTzfira’”, in Gerben Zaagsma (ed.), Jewish Studies in the Digital Age (Berlin: Degruyter, 2022), 245-268. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110744828-012
– Zef Segal, Jörn Seemann, & Bram Vannieuwenhuyze, “Introduction,” in Zef Segal and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze (eds.), Motion in Maps/Maps in motion: Mapping Stories and Movement through the Time (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
– Zef Segal & Menahem Blondheim, “Responsa Between Two Worlds: America, Eastern Europe, & the Connection Between Distance and Authority at the Turn of the 19th Century,” in Menahem Blondheim and Hananel Rosenberg (eds.), Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: Two Thousand Years of Saying Goodbye without Leaving (New York: Israel Academic Press, 2020), 330-348.
– Zef Segal, “Post and Railway ‘Right of Way’: Infrastructures as Delimitators of Voluntary Territorial Identities in Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany,” in Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rüdiger (eds.), Historicizing Infrastructure: History, Materiality and Human Agency in the Study of Infrastructure (Copenhagen: Aalborg University Press, 2017), 51-82.
– Zef Segal, “Infrastructure, cartographie et circulation : ouverture et fermeture des frontières du royaume de Bavière au 19 ème siècle”, in Sylvie Considère and Thomas Perrin (eds.), Frontières et représentations sociales : questions et perspectives méthodologiques (Louvain-la-Neuve: Harmattan-Academia, 2017), 297-320. (French)
– Zef Segal, “Real, Actual and Imagined Borders – State Construction in the »Third Germany«” in Jose Brunner and Iris Nachum (eds.), Die Deutschen als die Anderen: Deutschland in der imagination seiner Nachbarn (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012), 21-43.
Articles
(in chronological order)
– Zef Segal, “‘From One End of the Earth to the Other End of the Earth’: Changing Perceptions of the World in Late-Nineteenth-Century Hebrew Journalism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2022), 389-411. https://doi.org/10.1628/jsq-2022-0023.
-Zef Segal, “From a Local Periodical to a Global Enterprise: Ha-Me’asef, 1896- 1914”, Journal of Historical Network Research 6.1 (2021), 192-219. https://doi.org/10.25517/jhnr.v6i1.89.
– Zef Segal & Oren Soffer, “One Journal, One Decade, 3,797,592 Words: Computational Analysis of HaTzfira’s Discourse (1874–1883),” Journal of Jewish Studies 72.2 (2021), 369-396. https://doi.org/10.18647/3508/jjs-2021
– Zef Segal & Oren Soffer, “From Weekly to Daily: Computational Analysis of Periodical Time Cycles,” Journalism Studies 21.14 (2020), 1952-1972. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1807394. .
– Zef Segal, Oren Soffer, Nurit Greidinger, Sinai Rusinek, & Vered Silber-Varod, “Computational Analysis of Historical Hebrew Newspapers: Proof of Concept,” Zutot – Perspectives on Jewish Culture 17 (2020), 97-110. https://doi.org/10.1163/18750214-12171087.
– Zef Segal, “The Two Edged Sword: German Capital Cities Empowerment and State Construction during the Nineteenth Century, 1815- 1866,” The Journal of Historical Geography 60 (2018), 52-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.12.005.
– Zef Segal & Menahem Blondheim, “America on the Responsa Map: Hasidim, Mitnagdim and the Trans-Atlantic Social Network of Religious Authority,” American Jewish History 102 (2017), 133-153. doi:10.1353/ajh.2018.0007.
– Zef Segal & Menahem Blondheim, “The Evolution of an International Social Network: Ha-Me’asef Periodical in the years 1896-1904”, Kesher 50 (2017), 150-156. (Hebrew) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26936864.
– Zef Segal, “Comunicazioni eformazione dello Stato. Il servizio postalenegli Stati tedeschi, 1815-1866,” Archivio per la Storia Postale 9 (2017), 59-80. (Italian).
– Zef Segal, “Nationalizing the Global and the Local: Demarcating Church Authority in German States following the End of the Holy Roman Empire,” Wichmann-Jahrbuch des Diözesangeschichtsvereins Berlin 54-55 (2015), 40-56.
– Zef Segal, “Communication and State Construction: The Postal Service in the Medium sized German States, 1815-1866,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44.4 (2013), 453-473. https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_a_00610.
Book Reviews
(in chronological order)
– Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place, Charles Travis, Francis Ludlow, Ferenc Gyuris (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (2021). Review in: Historical Geography 49 (2023), 135-137.
Other Publications
(in chronological order)
– Zef Segal, “Technological Humanities”, Adraba – a Podcast of the Open University and Galey Tzahal, 14 February 2023, https://omny.fm/shows/adraba/dc577a03-232b-455b-be13-afa900a52f2b.
– Zef Segal, “Textual Reuse in Journalism: Exploring the Early History of Hebrew Journalism with a Computer”, The Digital Channel of Zefat Academic College, 19 May 2022, https://youtu.be/0RDzEfEMYWY (Podcast)
– Zef Segal, “An Analog Language in a Digital World”, Askola 6 (2021), 28-31 (Hebrew). https://www.openu.ac.il/publications/ascola/pages/ascola6.aspx
– Saeed Amal, Mustafa Adam, Peter Brusilovsky, Einat Minkov, Zef Segal and Tsvi Kuflik, “Visualizing Personalized Multifaceted ad-hoc Social Network,” UMAP ’20 Adjunct: Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (Genoa, 2020), 101-102. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3397606
– Saeed Amal, Mustafa Adam, Peter Brusilovsky, Einat Minkov, Zef Segal and Tsvi Kuflik, “Demonstrating Personalized Multifaceted Visualization of People Recommendation to Conference Participants,” IUI ’20: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2020), 49-50. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379336.3381455
Conferences
(in chronological order)
– “Periodicals in Motion: Textual Reuse and the Hebrew Journalistic Networks in the Second Half of the 19th Century”, GrapHNR 2023: Graphs and Networks in the Fourth Dimension, Mainz, July 2023 (lecture).
– “Periodicals in Motion: Textual Reuse and the Hebrew Journalistic Networks in the Second Half of the 19th Century”, Periodicals and Belonging, the 11th International ESPRit Conference, Leeds, June 2023 (lecture).
– “Imagined motion in Haifa: Digitally reading space and time in Ikhtayyi by Emile Habibi”, Comparing Landscapes: Approaches to Space and Affect in Literary Fiction, Bielefeld, April 2023 (lecture).
– “Defining a place: Digitally reading space and time in Ikhtayyi by Emile Habibi”, Building Digital Humanities 2022, Sydney, November 2022 (lecture).
– “Imagined motion in Haifa: Digitally reading space and time in Ikhtayyi by Emile Habibi”, Spatial Humanities 2022, Ghent, September 2022 (lecture).
– “Imagined motion in Haifa: Digitally reading space and time in Ikhtayyi by Emile Habibi”, in Fantastic Geographies: 13th Annual Conference of the Association for Research in the Fantastic, Dortmund, September 2022 (lecture).
– “Periodicals in Motion: Textual Reuse and the Hebrew Journalistic Networks in the Second Half of the 19th Century”, in The 18th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 2022 (lecture).
– “Topological Similarity as Means of Comparing and Clustering Diagrams” in The Challenges of Schriftbildlichkeit/Iconotextuality for Digital Editions of Diagrammatic Manuscripts, Haifa, June 2022 (invited talk).
– “From Cultural Heritage to Digital Collections: The Affordances of Computational Research”, in The National Forum of Academic Libraries, Tel Aviv, March 2022 (invited talk).
– “Periodicals in Motion: Textual Reuse and the Network of Hebrew Journals in the Second Half of the 19th Century”, in the 2022 Research Day of Tel Aviv Jaffa College, Tel Aviv, February 2022 (lecture).
– “Periodicals in Motion: Textual Reuse and the Hebrew Journalistic Networks in the Second Half of the 19th Century” in EADH 202: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Data, Krasnoyarsk, September 2021 (lecture).
– “’Imagined Motion in Haifa: A Digital Reading of the Concepts of Space and Time in Ekhtaye by Emile Habibi” in Distant Reading and Computational Research in Hebrew Literature, Beer Sheba, April 2021 (lecture). https://youtu.be/YW6hSMzlRfw
– “The Significance and Uniqueness of Passover in Jewish Culture – A Computational Analysis of Nineteenth Century Hebrew Journalism”, in Everyone’s Holidays in The Media, Ra’anana, April 2021 (invited talk)
– “From a Local Periodical to a Global Enterprise: Ha-Me’asef, 1896-1914” in ESSHC 2021, Leiden, March 2021 (lecture).
– “Constructing the Modern Jewish “Present”: Computational Analysis of Periodical Time Cycles in HaTzfira” in #DHJewish – Jewish Studies in the Digital Age, Luxemburg, January 2021 (lecture).
– “Constructing the Modern Jewish “Present”: Computational Analysis of Periodical Time Cycles in HaTzfira” in Software for the Past (SfP): Digital Technologies to Study the Past and Present, Kinneret, December 2020 (lecture).
– “’Imagined Motion in Haifa: A Digital Reading of the Concepts of Space and Time in Ekhtaye by Emile Habibi” in Mapping Space Mapping Time Mapping Texts, London, September 2020 (poster).
– “’Imagined Motion in Haifa: A Digital Reading of the Concepts of Space and Time in Ekhtaye by Emile Habibi” in Mapping Space Mapping Time Mapping Texts, London, September 2020 (lecture).
–“Visualizing Personalized Multifaceted ad-hoc Social Network,” in UMAP ’20 Adjunct: Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, Genoa, July 2020 (with Saeed Amal, Mustafa Adam, Peter Brusilovsky, Einat Minkov, and Tsvi Kuflik).
– “Demonstrating Personalized Multifaceted Visualization of People Recommendation to Conference Participants” in IUI 2020, Cagliari, March 2020 (demo) (with Saeed Amal, Mustafa Adam, Peter Brusilovsky, Einat Minkov, and Tsvi Kuflik).
– “Imagined Movement in Haifa: Digitally Reading the Space and Time of Achtia by Emile Habibi” in the Annual Israeli Conference of Hebrew Literature, Ra’anana, December 2019 (lecture).
– “The Periodical as a Geographical Space: the 19th century Hebrew ‘HaZefirah’ as a Case Study” in DH2019, Utrecht, July 2019 (lecture).
– “The Periodical as a Geographical Space,” Info 2018, The 34nd Annual Conference, Tel Aviv, May 2019 (invited talk).
– “Digital Middle Ages” in the Annual Conference on Middle Ages Research, Ra’anana, March 2019 (invited panel).
– “Computational Analysis of Historical Hebrew Newspapers: Affordances and Restrictions” in JJCHC2019, New York, March 2019 (lecture) (with Vered Silber-Varod, Nurit Greidinger, Oren Soffer)
– “”From one end of the Earth […] unto the other end of the Earth”: Changing Perceptions of the World in Late-Nineteenth-Century Jewish Journalism” in the 50th AJS Annual Conference, Boston, December 2018 (lecture).
– The topography of literary texts, Workshop on Mapping Literary Texts using Recogito in The Digital Carmel Hackathon, Haifa, September 2018 (invited talk).
– “From a local periodical to a global enterprise: Ha-Me’asef, 1896-1914” in the 3rd Transnational Journalism History Conference, Montreal, June 2018 (lecture).
– “Hermeneutic Digital Humanities: Locating Social Groups in Historical Sources” in Negotiating the Other, Confronting the Self, German-Israeli Frontiers of Humanities Symposium, Jerusalem, September 2017 (invited talk).
– “The Evolution of a Transnational Rabinnical Network: The Periodical “Ha-Me`asef”, 1896-1914” in The 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 2017 (lecture).
– “The Evolution of an international Network: Ha-Me’asef 1896-1904”, in Info 2017, The 32nd Annual Conference, Tel Aviv, May 2017 (invited talk).
– “Was ist der Bayern Vaterland: Forming a Spatial Identity in 19th century Germany” in Lived Space, Perceived Space, and Conceived Space: Social Power Relations after the Spatial Turn, Zichron Ya’akob, May 2017 (lecture).
– “The Changing Definition of Primary Sources in Digital History” in Literature and History: A Look from the Margins (Joint Israel-Canada Academies of Sciences and Humanities), Jerusalem, December 2016 (invited talk).
– “The Evolution of an International Social Network: Ha-Me’asef Periodical, 1896-1904” in EVA/MINERVA Conference on advanced Technologies of Culture, Jerusalem, November 2016 (lecture).
– “The Use of Social Network Analysis in Historical Research” in Colloquium of the German Historical Institute, Washington DC, July 2016 (Colloquium talk).
– “Inter-German Migration Patterns and National Identities: The “Third Germany” in Mid-Nineteenth Century” in ASEN Conference on Nationalism, Migration, and Population Change, London, April 2016 (lecture).
– “Non-Euclidean Geometry at the Service of the Understanding of the Jewish Space” in Colloquium of the Department of General History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, March 2016 (Colloquium talk).
– “International Networks of Halachic Communication: The Jerusalem published Ha-Me’asef 1896-1914” in The Annual Israeli Geographical Association Conference, Jerusalem, Dec. 2015 (lecture).
– “Spatial Analysis of Jewish Responsa- Research Insights and Innovative Digital Methodologies” in The Twelfth Annual Jerusalem Conference on the Digitization of Cultural Heritage, Jerusalem, November 2015 (lecture).
– Panel on Cartographic Representations in the Jewish World in Summer Workshop of Elyashar Center, Ben Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, August 2015 (lecture).
– “The mid-19th Century Annihilation of Space: The Railway Infrastructure Delimitation of Territorial Identities in 19th Century Germany” in Icohtec- Histelcon: History of High-Technologies and Their Socio-Cultural Contexts, Tel Aviv, August 2015 (lecture).
– “America on the Responsa Map- Hasidim, Mitnagdim and the Connection between Distance and Authority” in International Conference of Historical Geographers, London, July 2015 (lecture).
– “Non-Euclidean Geometry at the Service of the Understanding of the Jewish Space” in Da’at Hamakom Annual Conference, Ma’ale Ha-hamisha, July 2015 (Colloquium talk).
– “Non-Euclidean Mapping: Escaping the Shackles of Euclidean Geometry in the Representation of Geopolitical Arguments in the Past and in the Present” in Maps and Political Imagination, Ben Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, April 2015 (Colloquium talk).
– “German Capital Cities: Empowerment and State Construction 1815-1866” in American Historical Association 129, New York, January 2015 (lecture).
– “Infrastructure, Cartography and Movement: Debordering and Rebordering 19th Century Germany” in Brit XIV: The Border, a Source of Innovation, Arres, Lille and Mons, November 2014 (lecture).
– “Post and Railway as Creators of Voluntary Territorial Identity in Mid-19th Century Germany” in New Directions in the History of Infrastructure, Interdisciplinary Conference at the Danish Post & Tele Museum, Copenhagen, September 2014 (lecture).
– “America on the Responsa Map: Hasidim, Mitnagdim and the Connection between Distance and Authority” in Da’at Hamakom Annual Conference, Ma’ale Ha-hamisha, September 2014 (Colloquium talk).
– “Digital Humanities: an Introduction to GIS and SNA,” in Truman Institute Forum, Jerusalem, June 2014 (Colloquium talk).
– “Demarking Church Authority: Spatial Reorganization following the End of the Holy Roman Empire” in Die katholische Daispora in Deutschland: Stand und Perspektiven der Forschung, Katholische Akademie in Berlin, Berlin, March 2014 (lecture).
– “Inter German Migration Patterns and Transnational Identity: ‘Third Germany’ in Mid-19th Century” in Migration, Refugees, Nomadic, the Annual Israeli Historical Society Conference, Haifa, June 2013 (lecture).
– “Infrastructure, Cartography and Movement: Spatial Perception in 19th Century Germany” in Geography without Boundaries, the Annual Israeli Geographical Association Conference, Be’er Sheva, Dec. 2012 (lecture).
– “The Extensions of Man”: The State and the Postal System: German medium Sized States 1815-1866, International Conference of Historical Geographers, Prague, Aug. 2012 (lecture).
– “Was ist des Bayern Vaterland?”: Bavaria‟s Spatial Formation, 1815-1866,” in Colloquium on Social, Cultural & Political History (TAU, UCLA, University of Zurich), Peqi‟in, Feb. 2012 (lecture).
– “Real, Actual and Imagined Borders: The Creation of German States,” in Germany and its Neighbors: Borders, Identities, Relations, Tel Aviv, Feb. 2011 (lecture).
– “Bavaria in the 19th Century: an Integrating or Disintegrating State?,” in In the Enchanted Circle: Jews, Germans and Others in German History, In Honor of Professor Shulamit Volkov, Tel Aviv, Oct. 2010 (lecture).
– “Representation and Practices of State Space: The Medium Sized States in Germany in the Years 1815-1866,” in Workshop for Young Researchers in German History, Yad Hashmona, Jan. 2010 (lecture).