The following is a digital project I would like to put together in the near future and which I’d like to discuss in this year’s Roots and Routes Summer Institute here at U of T

The Archives of the Crown of Aragon contain hundreds of thousands of documents dealing with the history of the Jews in the territories under the control of the Catalano-Aragonese crown. Catalan and Aragonese rulers kept records from the earliest times, much of which survived the centuries.  The great territorial and political expansion that marked the reign of King Jaume the Conqueror (1213-1276) and the more complex bureaucracy necessary to manage Jaume’s new territories led to the creation of the Royal Archives of the Crown of Aragon, a development furthered by the revival of Roman Law and the acquisition of paper-making technology from the Muslims with the conquest of Valencia. The chancery registers of the monarchs of the Crown of Aragon total today over 6,000 volumes of nearly four million unpublished documents spanning seven centuries. The royal chancery of Pere the Ceremonious alone (1336-1387) produced 1,164 volumes of an average of 200 folios each. Since The Crown viewed Jews and Muslims as part of the royal treasury this body of documents include much detail about the daily life of Jews in the medieval Crown of Aragon.

Nineteenth-century archivists and early twentieth-century scholars have catalogued and indexed the documents dealing with Jews in the royal chancery registers for the period of 1213-1327. Such finding aids do not exist for the later period making the process of finding documents dealing with Jews after that period much more time-consuming and tedious. It is precisely this excess of sources that often makes this crucial period for the history of the Jews of the Crown of Aragon so understudied. Over the course of one year, during my dissertation research, I catalogued about 200 registers at the ACA, covering the period 1379-1391. While much of this material is referenced in my dissertation, I hope to make this catalogue available to future scholars in a tool that can be collaboratively expanded as new registers are studied.

Making the full catalogue available would be an ambititous project that would take some time to implement since it would include tagging over 3,000 documents. The proposal is therefore to start with a far more focused project to begin to share at least some of the documentation. The idea is therefore to focus on one Jewish individual – Samuel Gracia, originally from the town of l’Arboç, south of Barcelona. Although most individual Jews appear only once or twice in the royal registers, I have located at least fifty letters dealing with Samuel Gracia. Involved in a series of lawsuits against family, Jews, Christians, and Jewish officials, Samuel Gracia presents an interesting case study for scholars interested in migration as well as the legal culture of late fourteenth-century Catalonia. I have used his case extensively in my dissertation to discuss the ways in which Jews in Catalonia and Aragon consumed Christian justice in order to settle disputed with coreligionists. Through his crafty use of multiple Christian courts and navigation of jurisdictional boundaries, Samuel Gracia exemplifies the degree to which Jews were acculturated in the mainstream legal culture of Catalonia and Aragon.

This case fits well within the topic of Roots & Routes since many ways it shows a Jew often challenging his own Jewish roots in search of ways out of legal and fiscal problems. The main idea is to build a collaborative site – or upload to e-Porte – images of the documents dealing with Samuel Gracia in order to share with the wider world. Ideally, scholars working at local archives in the areas where Samuel lived would add any documents they found in the course of their research.

The hope is that the sources and the topics they illuminate would help bridge the gap between Jewish history, Spanish (or Mediterranean) history and mainstream medieval European history. Within the fields of Mediterranean history, for example, legal cultural historians have began to show how those traditionally considered powerless such as women or slaves used law and litigation in order to shape their lives and identities. Because the assumption by these historians is that Jews resided outside mainstream legal traditions, they have for the most part been absent from these conversations. This project could go  a long way in bridging this gap.

It’s the end of another insanely busy academic year and only recently have I found a few minutes to spare comment here about a few new tools that I discovered thanks to Rochelle Mazar, the emerging technologies librarian at UTM. One such tools is VoiceThread, a tool that allows conversations around images, texts, or videos. This video illustrates the many features of this tool.

I was immediately taken by the pedagogical potential of this tool. It could be an interesting way to foster discussion around an image or video before class, for example, or even to continue in-class discussion. In that sense, it would allow for more inclusive teaching as it would allow students who are shy to express their views as well as allowing students to express their views not only in written form but also in spoken form (allowing perhaps for more in-depth comments). The interface itself is very clean and intuitive and hopefully wouldn’t scare the computer illiterate students.

At the very least, it could be a cool way of going through the class syllabus. To test the system, I uploaded a pdf of the syllabus for my recent course and had Rochelle add comments (both types and spoken comments). The comments took a few minutes to appear on my end, but I liked the way the system works, allowing comments to be placed near points in the text. This might actually be a better tool than wikis, for example, for allowing students to comment on each other’s work. The good thing is that it can also be embedded on webpages – so one could embed it on blackboard, for instance, or in a wiki page. The example below is the syllabus example I mentioned above. What do you think?

As most historians, I have thousands of images of documents that I use on my research. Some are photographs of manuscripts and others are scans of photocopies that I made from a microfilm at the archives. As I collected my documents, I entered information about them on a FileMaker Pro database so that in the future I could search for either a person or a keyword. I collected thousands of royal letters at the archives in Barcelona and my plan was to work on each chapter thematically. When I wrote a paper on conversion from Judaism to Christianity last summer, all I had to do was search for “converso” in my database. That gave me a list of the documents I had on that topic, I pulled them out or printed them, and used them for my paper. So the idea was to make a list of documents related to the larger theme of each chapter, pull all of the documents out (most I have in photocopies and I was willing to print the ones I had only in digital photographs), put them in a separate folder, and work on them. But once it was clear that the list of documents for my current chapter was in the hundreds and that with each document possibly reaching five pages, I needed a better system that didn’t involve shuffling around massive amounts of loose paper. That’s where Adobe Bridge comes in.

Since we have a 24″ iMac, I thought I could simply go through the documents on the screen and take notes on my laptop. My favourite way to browse through images is to use Bridge, which allows me to easily mark files, move them, rename them, etc. It soon became clear that I could be using Bridge for more than simply displaying the images and perhaps moving them to a separate folder dedicated to the theme of the chapter. You see, Bridge allows for tagging. You can add keywords to any file through it. Better yet, you don’t need Bridge to access those keywords. They get embedded onto the file itself so I can actually search for keywords on Spotlight on Mac OS X and the images would come up. Within a folder, it gives me a list of the all th keywords I have assigned in that folder, which allows me to quickly get to the document I want by clicking on the keyword.

Here’s the setup (click on the images for larger size):

These are some of my Bridge Screen shots, notice the keywords on the left bottom side:

Another neat thing about Bridge. Notice the film strip on the bottom of the page where it displays the images I’m working on. You’ll notice on the picture above that some of them have a number “2″ superimposed. Those are two-documents. I can select all the pages that go together and group them. They still display the same way but it means they don’t get separated and count only as one file on Bridge, which gives me a more accurate sense of how many documents I’m dealing with and how many documents relate to a specific keyword.

For my notes, I’ve been using DevonThink Pro, which is simple, allows you to create files of all kinds within it and has very powerful searching capabilities:

You’ll notice that some files are labeled green and some are yellow. Since one of the objectives is to compare Catalunya with Aragon, I decided to assign a colour to each. Catalunya is yellow and Aragon is green. Looks like this might be a system that will work for me. By the way, for those of you who need printed notes to be able to write, DevonThink allows for easy export of all the files you select as word documents or text files (or even PDF). But I think I’ll try to minimize the printing. When it comes time to write, I’ll go to my carrel, where I have a second monitor (just a 17″ flat screen, those can be had for very little money these days) and I can display the notes on one screen while I write on the other.

Scribe is turning out to be very buggy for importing info from my Bookends bibliography database. I came across DEVONthink, a really powerful information manager that seems VERY flexible and can index, search, organize, create wiki-style links, cross-reference, all kinds of files. It’s not free but it might be a good investment…

Take a look on the video here. Hmm, another toy to play with…

Most of my documents at the archives are available in microfilm, which, although nice for preserving the integrity of the 600-year old documents I look at, means that the only available copying method is a paper photocopy from the microfilm. It’s all very nice to have hard copies of things but for a big research project such as mine, it means I end up with thousands of paper sheets to bring home.
I pondered about it for a while. The lot was too heavy to bring with me as carry on when I go back to Canada. Sending it through the mail or as checked luggage means a risk I’m not prepared to take. The only way I could do it is if I had a second set of copies done. That way, I could send one set, wait until it got there and then send the second set without having to worry about it. There’s only one problem with that: it would double the amount of paper and weight of the whole lot.

The solution occurred to me when I had to scan a document for my dad. Since we don’t have a scanner at home here, I went to a local photocopying place in Gracia. I noticed that their photocopying machine was also a scanner so theoretically, it would be just as easy for them to scan something as it would to photocopy it. So I talked to Susana, the girl in charge, and we agreed on a price per volume to scan my documents. I took about half of what I have sitting at home last week and went to pick it up yesterday. Total: 2,771 pages. About 1.5 GB stored on a DVD. And that’s only half of what I have photocopied at home! And I have probably as many pages from the digital registers*! I estimate that by the end, I’ll probably have somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 manuscript pages, covering a short period of 10 years.

I’ll definitely need to find a way of narrowing it down when I get back….

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* some of the chancery registers I look at have been digitized (photographed) and I was able to just copy the image files instead of making photocopies of those…