Public Launch Event: Signatures of Friendship

Signatures of Friendship

Exploring the Jerusalem Guest Book of Miryam and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl (1927–1966) 

Digitising written artefacts offers many opportunities for researching and teaching. The increasing availability of digital representations, however, can challenge the human ability to process large amounts of visual information and therefore requires appropriate forms of presentation. This experimental digital edition of a multilingual private guest book from 20th century Jerusalem combines existing open-source visualisation technologies to make a unique written artefact intuitively and comfortably explorable, while linking it to other data, knowledge and media resources. Patterns become visible, and individual entries reveal remarkable personal stories as well as insights into the historical moments of recording. Among many others, these pages bring together Adolf Hitler’s art enemy number one, C. G. Jung’s dentist, Amos Oz’s famous uncle, Franz Kafka’s Hebrew teacher, Heinrich Heine’s legitimate heiress, the chief editor of the last German newspaper in Israel, the inventor of Hebrew shorthand and a Nazi travelling to Palestine.