For the second portion of this summer fellowship, I’ve been focused on editing and organizing the digital collection for the Wallach Project. This requires editing, formatting, tagging, and categorizing hundreds of items before they are able to “go live” on the site. I am still making my way through these items, and imagine that this portion of the project will be ongoing. In the future, there will be a submission form on the Wallach Project website which will allow people to add their own items to the collection, streamlining how much work has to happen on the back end of the website. 

I am satisfied with the progress that I have made this summer, though I know this project will be ever-evolving. There is still a significant amount of work to do before launching the site, it turns out this project was quite the undertaking. Even so – I have learned a great deal about building a website on WordPress, and feel much more confident in my ability to problem solve as I move forward. I will continue to edit photos, and build the digital collection. 

The Digital Scholarship and Publishing fellowship has allowed me to dive deep into this work, something I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. I am proud that the nonprofit will now have a public home, and will ideally be a resource for future scholars as well as family and community interested in the Wallach story.

-Amelia 

Bringing history to the forefront of creative practice and the art world isn’t something that happens much beyond academia and museums. People are often interested in the new, shiny, exciting work (which to be fair is wonderful) that the older, more tactile creative histories often fall to the wayside. In the last few years of research I’ve conducted in Germany, I have noticed an interest in reviving slow craft and its history. Much of this history involves recognizing the role and cultural impact Jewish craftspeople and artists had on German society as a whole. Not only is this an important conversation, but it is one that so many people are itching to have.

This summer, I am focusing on helping move this history back into the conversation. The first couple of weeks working with the DSP fellowship have provided me with the time to learn how to build the framework for a website. This website will be the face of The Wallach Project, a German nonprofit (Verein) focused on the preservation, education, and reimagination of German Jewish Wallach craft and history. This website will include an archive of objects passed through generations of my (Wallach) family who’ve been scattered through the world due to WWII. So far, this collection is my greatest challenge. I knew that creating an archive would require hard and tedious work, but I wasn’t knowledgeable of the ‘behind the scenes’ steps required to make a professional archive (metadata, tags, cataloging, etc…). Because this collection of digitized objects is a large part of the Wallach Project, the quality of work must match that of museums and other collections. It is my hope that this collection will act as a resource for further scholarship as well as an access point for members of the Wallach family who have been disconnected from their history. 

I realize that 8 weeks is not a ton of time for a project of this caliber. I feel satisfied with the progress that I’ve made and hold onto my goal of launching the website and archive by the end of the summer. Beyond learning the framework needed for building a website, I have also learned the basics of digital illustration as means of creating logos and text for the website. 

The research for The Wallach Project has been in the works for years and the legal aspects of establishing a German Verein have taken nearly as long. Seeing this project move from thought to reality is incredibly rewarding, and I can’t wait to share more with you as things move along. 

-Amelia