We have presented and published on our work surrounding the Annotated Star at the following conference and publications:

Matthew Handelman. Digital Humanities as Translation: Visualizing Franz Rosenzweig’s Archive. Article in TRANSIT, vol. 10.1, ed. Jon Cho-Polizzi. Special Issue: The Digital German Humanities (2015).

This article consists of a theoretical framework for and a demonstration of the process of visualizing the finding aid to Franz Rosenzweig’s archive at the University of Kassel, which contains metadata describing documents and letters pertaining to the German-Jewish philosopher, pedagogue, and translator. Its main contention is that much of the work undertaken by the digital humanities, especially data conversion, refinement, and visualization, involves salient yet undertheorized moments of translation. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s own theory of translation, which advocates radical formal fidelity to the original, offers a revealing lens to understand the potential and limitations of visualizing the metadata of his archive – a lens I use to guide my translation of the archival metadata. As I show, the visualization’s inclusion of peripheral voices in his archive implied by such fidelity exposes a correspondence between the journalist Siegfried Kracauer and educator Ernst Simon that calls the ideological implications of Rosenzweig’s theory of translation into question. This dialectical movement between theory and praxis, metadata and material archive, I contend, is the promise and productive threat that the digital humanities represent for German Studies: as much as the digital humanities pave new inroads for research, they also require and return us to critical concepts central to German literary and cultural discourse, such as translation.

Matthew Handelman. “Towards a Messianic Theory of (Digital) Knowledge: Rosenzweig, Digital Humanities, and ‘Bewährung.’” Paper presentation. German Studies Association. Kansas City, MO. September 2014,

Matthew Handelman, Ynon Wygoda, Shay Rojansky, Sinai Rusinek. “The Annotated Star: A Collaborative Digital Edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.” Poster presentation. DH2014. Lausanne Switzerland. July 2014.

Ynon Wygoda, Old Wine in New Bottles: Franz Rosenzweig and the Reappraisal of the Authoritative Text, from Holy Text to E-text. Paper presentation. Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. December 2013.

Matthew Handelman, Corroborative Collaboration: On a Digital Edition of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. Poster presentation. Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. December 2013.