The IHC’s Digital Humanities Lab is one of the partners of the project “Western Sephardic Diaspora Roadmap”, starting in January 2021 and which crosses the methods of Digital Humanities and Information Sciences with the study of the Jewish Diaspora to build to a portal and work tool for researchers, archivists, librarians and the interested public.

The WSD Roadmap portal “will be an open, responsive and intuitive web platform that will provide information on documentary materials related to the Western Sephardic Diaspora and its background”. Focusing on two categories — archival collections and published primary sources — it will have two searchable and publicly available databases.

The principal investigator of the project is Carla Vieira (CHAM – NOVA FCSH), with Daniel Alves (IHC – NOVA FCSH) and Paula Ochôa (CHAM – NOVA FCSH) as co-coordinators. The project has the support of international funds, as well as the Alberto Beneviste Chair of Sephardic Studies (University of Lisbon).

The coordinators and their team hope, through resource optimization and data sharing, to encourage future projects in this area, especially so that they can cross different geographies of the Western Sephardic Diaspora and stimulate the development of Jewish Studies in Portugal.

Image: The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (Emanuel de Witte, 1680)