Teaching & Learning

Footprints: Impact on Teaching and Learning

Footprints, emerging from the intersection of Jewish Studies and the digital humanities, prepares the 21st century learner to develop new ways of analyzing information through their study of Jewish history. By using Footprints, learners accustomed to relying on search engines to gather information learn how to critically analyze digital information in a database. They learn to curate pieces of data that connect with one another, creating new historical narratives and visualizations. As such, aspects of Jewish history and culture once unknown emerge. Rather than writing research papers that only their professors see, learners’ curations, when added to the Footprints site, become open to other users who can then expand upon them.

However, it is not only the experience of the learner that changes. By engaging with Footprints, the way one teaches change as well. In the past, instructors would build syllabi and present the Jewish historical experience by examining the contents of collections written by major Jewish figures and valued intellectual history as central to our teaching. Today, Footprints enables an instructor to expand this approach by also teaching through the lens of the material object--the individual book copy. They can now introduce learners to the people who owned the books. The collector, the buyer, the seller, the expurgator, the bookdealer and ultimately the library converge to offer a view of Jewish life and culture that generates new research questions and different discoveries. People such as tradesmen, non-Jews, widows, playwrights, book patrons and philanthropists are added back into the narrative of Jewish history in ways that yield new understandings of the Jewish experience.

Footprints in the Classroom

The Footprints database when used in classrooms can help students connect and engage with the history of the books in different ways. Below are some examples of how Footprints have been used in different classrooms to help users engage with this database.

Personalizing the history of the Jewish Book: In this undergraduate capstone course taught in 2015, one of the goals was to help students to think not only about the history of individual book copies, but also about how they personally connect to that history. Using one of the earliest versions of Footprints, the students were not only able to think about the Jewish book of the past and connect with it; they also were able to learn about the power of technology to preserve that past.

From Scroll to Screen: The History of the Jewish Book: When this graduate seminar course was taught in Summer (year) at JTS, the challenge was to help students explore the shifting dimensions of media revolutions, including technology, materiality, and cultural shifts. Footprints helped engage students in the long and lengthy history of literary materials and the material evidence involved in reconstructing intellectual and personal history.

Jews and Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World: In this undergraduate survey course of Jews and Judaism circa 500 CE to 1800 CE, the challenge was to get the students to think about the impact of print, circulation of books and linkage to migrations and other developments in Jewish history. Footprints helped students compare the singular journey of a book now in Pittsburgh to other copies of the same editions, other editions of the same book, other versions, similar texts etc.

Footprints in Research

The Footprints database also facilitates research opportunities for a variety of students with different backgrounds and skill sets. For-credit internships and research experiences (independent studies) as well as paid student work experiences have been offered in the Columbia University Libraries and the University of Pittsburgh.

Introductory Research Experiences

Several first-year undergraduates at Pitt participated in a project through a spring-term program called “First Experiences in Research.” Without prior knowledge of Hebrew language or book history, they worked with auction sales catalogues and other inventories (scanned, on-line, and available in the Pitt library) to find information about provenance and create spreadsheets to upload to the site. In doing so, they were taught basic skills in bibliography and library research. Doing research on book provenance through the Footprints project makes use not only of the database itself for pedagogical purposes but also offers students an introduction to digital humanities research, offering tools for thinking about relating to sources, database design, and compilation of large data sets.

More Advanced Research Experiences

At the Columbia University Libraries, several interns worked for a variety of projects connected to Footprints. A three-year project to catalog the rare print collection included a special focus on unique aspects of the books being cataloged. This project has been documented Rare Printed Hebraica. Each of the three students on the project discovered different footprints, and two of them wrote short essays (Adventures In The Rare Book Stacks) for the Jewish Studies @ Columbia blog describing what they found in the books over the course of their work. Additional student interns at the undergraduate and graduate levels worked on Footprints data ingest projects, which always required additional research into the history of various individuals that interacted with the books being described. Aside from honing their research experience, these internships also exposed the students to principles of digital humanities and cataloging.

Teach Paleography Workshop: Over the course of Footprints work, there was a critical need in the field of early modern Hebrew paleography. While the study of Hebrew scripts in the medieval period is well represented, the study of early modern Jewish hands had been neglected. We thus organized a series of workshops to teach early modern Hebrew script. The first workshop was held in February 2020 (Teach Paleography Workshop), and focused on the Jews of Northern and Central Europe. Using printed books with annotations, the participants learned about the “largest hidden archive of early modern Jewish history” as they deciphered inscriptions in printed books dealing with many different aspects of early modern life.

Tips & Strategies for Using Footprints in the Classroom:

Some examples of audiences and fields that make use of the site include Book history, Diaspora/Migration studies, Early modern and Modern Jewish history, Library science, Curation/museum studies, Provenance research (and cultural restitution studies). Consider the following tips/strategies as you decide to use Footprints in your learning environment

• Make students familiar with the site: Walk them through it and show them the different features by using an example of the journey of the book to other copies of the same editions, other editions of the same book, other versions, similar texts etc.
• Use Footprints as a display and repository for students’ individual research activities: Identifying lists of Jewish books or digitized copies of single editions and researching the “life story” of a book as it moves through time and place.
• Examine larger trends in the movement of books as material objects as an interactive visualization tool: Querying the database for large-scale movement of books in different periods (for example the relocation of books after WWII to new centers).
• As an online resource: the Jewish books tracked in Footprints also make an excellent case study for courses focused more broadly on the history of the book.
• Exercises where they study about rare books in a library: Identify what the book is about (using catalog as most of them don’t read Hebrew); what evidence there is in the book about book use; how they can trace where the book went after it was printed; using secondary sources and catalogs-- whether there are other editions of the book, whether there are manuscripts of the book, what we know about the author, what we know about the readers
• Storytelling: Tell an interesting story of a book and the path it has travelled. Ask students to share it via a blog or audio/visual components.

Example Assignments/Handouts using Footprints

Linked here are a few resources that could be downloaded and used as it pertains to your learning objectives and courses.

Show Tell Collaborate: Assignment Example

Biography of a Book

Preliminary Data Collection Handout

User Feedback on Footprints

“It’s amazing to think that a book printed in Amsterdam could surface a couple hundred years later in New York City – at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The second thing that struck me, and to which I alluded before, was the idea of a book as an object – more specifically, the Jewish book as object. I remember when my peer and I spent half an hour looking at an Ein Yaakov in the Rare Book Room, and amazingly enough, all of our time was spent examining any marginalia, cover art, and inscriptions we could find. Suddenly, the book wasn’t just a book of Jewish text; it was a personal artifact, an object that belonged to several people and was passed down across generations and across various European countries!” - Undergraduate Capstone Seminar on Book History, Spring 2015

“Footprints has managed to continuously build an effective model for collaborative crowdsourcing by combining the best ideas for a successful model and plans for future improvements” - Post Undergraduate, Johns Hopkins Museum Studies Program. Please view Miryam Gordon’s complete reflection here: Student Reflection

Footprints contribute to the research done on Jewish books to help everyone learn more about the personal histories of these books. And while users are encouraged to continuously add footprints to this database so as to widen the knowledge about the history of the Jewish books, educators are also encouraged to teach with the database so as to inspire a new generation of Jewish book culture, actively contributing to its future.