Zef Segal

College of Management Academic Studies · Department of Communication

This article examines the spatial and social evolution of the network of writers in the Jerusalem-based periodical Ha-Me’asef during the years 1896 – 1914 as a compelling and dynamic example of transnational Jewish networks. The periodical, which was established by Rabbi Ben-Zion Abraham Koenka in 1896, was exceptional in that it aspired to reach b...

Despite the dramatic effect of the railway age on the natural surroundings, it was not seen necessarily as destructive to nature. Railways were both the epitome of progress as well as integral features in pastoral landscapes. This seemingly paradoxical perception of railways is partially explained by historicising the "naturalisation" of the German...

This volume argues that the mapping of stories, movement and change should not be understood as an innovation of contemporary cartography, but rather as an important aspect of human cartography with a longer history than might be assumed. The authors in this collection reflect upon the main characteristics and evolutions of story and motion mapping...

In this study, we use computational tools to analyze the dynamic nature of the journalistic discourse as reflected in one decade (1874–1883) of one Eastern European Hebrew weekly—HaTzfira. To identify latent themes in HaTzfira’s discourse, we apply algorithmic topic-modeling analysis to an upgraded Optical Character Recognition of this periodical....

This paper explores the ways in which racial categories were invented, manipulated and represented through the medium of cartography during the nineteenth century. Drawing on the collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American atlases in the Library of Congress, this paper examines the history of racial mapping. It traces...

בניגוד למדינות אירופיות רבות אחרות, הרכבת לא נתפסה ברחבי העולם הגרמני של המאה התשע-עשרה כמנוגדת לכפריות או לטבעיות. היא נתפסה כחלק מהנוף הפסטורלי, יחד עם הנהר, העצים וחיות המשק. מאמר זה סוקר דימויים חזותיים של רכבות שהופיעו בהדפסים ובגלויות דואר, כדי לבחון את התפתחות הדימוי החזותי הגרמני, אם אכן קיים דימוי מאוחד כזה, ובעיקר את התהליך שהוביל להפיכת...

n July 1874, a map of the dateline was published in HaTzfira, a Hebrew journal printed in Warsaw. This was, most likely, the first map published in a Hebrew journal, and the text accompanying the map acknowledges the cartographic ignorance of the readers. During the years 1862–1885, 76 articles used the word “map” or inserted a map to append the te...

Dieses Kapitel analysiert die zunehmende vereinheitlichende Rolle der Bildung und die Versuche der staatlichen Behörden, die Geografie der Hochschulbildung zu kontrollieren. Die Untersuchung von Bildungsinfrastrukturen zeigt, dass Hochschulinstitute von älteren Instituten abhängig waren, was die Möglichkeiten räumlicher Reformen einschränkte. Als E...

Die Kommunikations- und Transporttechnologien und -infrastrukturen des 19. Jahrhunderts revolutionierten die Art und Weise, wie Menschen Raum und räumliche Bindungen wahrnahmen. Die neuen Postsysteme, Dampfschiffe, Eisenbahnlinien und später Telegrafenlinien machten Entfernungen kürzer, weniger zeitaufwendig und billiger. Viel mehr Menschen konnten...

The history of fake news is longer and more nuanced than usually considered. This article examines a particular case study in the late nineteenth century, in which the publication of fake news in a Hebrew journal, HaTzfira, caused a severe reaction that exposed structural flaws and undercurrents of journalistic confrontation as well as differing ap...

The modern periodical is an important medium in the construction of time. Its appearance and cycles of production turn artificial time cycles into seemingly natural and accepted social rhythms. Most importantly, periodicals play an important role in the construction of the “present” as a time frame of occurrences that happen “now”. However, the rep...

During the 19th century, new and improved communication and transportation technologies expanded »the known world.« This was especially true for the interconnected Jewish world, which readily utilized these technologies to communicate between remote communities. Accordingly, late 19th-century Jewish journals describe their readership, authorship an...

This article discusses different uses of computational methods in historical journalism research. It primarily focuses on time, space, and communication in modern Jewish history. (In Hebrew) In memory of Oren Soffer (1971-2021).

For many people, maps are still conceived as two-dimensional graphic representations of spatial arrangements, printed or drawn on paper, included in a book, posted against a wall or, more recently, seen on a computer or smartphone screen. From this perspective, maps remain static documents, offering a range of lifeless geodata such as landscape obj...

Ekhtaye tells a story of a traffic jam in the Israeli city of Haifa that stimulates the narrator's search for his lost childhood memory of the city, which faded after the establishment of the state of Israel. The paper is an attempt to map, or perhaps re-map or de-map, this imagined Haifa. Each appearance of a place-name in the text is another dime...

One of the most commonly used types of maps today are flow maps, which simultaneously depict movement in time, place, and volume on a geographical map, as seen in GPS navigation devices. This type of map-making was invented independently during the 1830-1840s by three railway engineers from the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France. However, as this...

This volume argues that the mapping of stories, movement and change should not be understood as an innovation of contemporary cartography, but rather as an important aspect of human cartography with a longer history than might be assumed. The authors in this collection reflect upon the main characteristics and evolutions of story and motion mapping...

This volume argues that the mapping of stories, movement and change should not be understood as an innovation of contemporary cartography, but rather as an important aspect of human cartography with a longer history than might be assumed. The authors in this collection reflect upon the main characteristics and evolutions of story and motion mapping...

In this article we examine the differences between weekly and daily time cycles in the nineteenth-century Hebrew newspaper HaTzfira. This newspaper changed its publication format in 1886 from weekly to daily. We use this case study to identify the meanings and implications of time cycles in the discourse constructed in each format, and most specifi...

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of several Hebrew newspapers in Eastern Europe and Palestine that provided a platform for a lively political discourse reflecting varied ideological approaches. This work focuses on one decade, 1874-1883, in the relatively long lifespan of the Hebrew weekly HaTzfira, which was founded...

The article investigates the gradual expansion of the international rabbinical network of contributors to the Jerusalem journal "Ha-me'asef" between 1896 and 1904. This journal began as a dream of a 29 year old editor, Ben-Zion Cuenca, who aspired to more than creating a local journal with an international readership, but rather an international jo...

19th century Germany is fertile ground for border research. The era saw continuous processes of debordering and rebordering, starting from the creation of new and sovereign German states in place of hundreds of previously existent principalities, and ending with the unification of these states under “imperial Germany”. This paper portrays a multi-d...

The end of the Holy Roman Empire marked the beginning of a new era in the German world. Napoleon transformed hundreds of small political entities into 37 sovereign states, each one with an individual tale of integration and territorialization. The delimitation of religious boundaries was an important feature of these tales, since a centralized admi...

The postal and railroad infrastructures have long been seen as part of the nationalization process in the nineteenth century. Both transformed society dramatically by giving the opportunity for spatial movement to the general population. Unlike other political modes of nationalization, the railway and the post were meaningful only as long as they w...

State construction is never purely a result of intentional planning. While the usual depiction of the history of state construction focuses on official plans, as well as on reforms and their success or failure, I wish to draw attention to the hidden currents, supporting or hindering state integration. This article depicts the unintentional dynamics...

On December 16th 1874, Chaim Zelig Slonimski, the founder and editor of ‘HaTsfira’, concluded the 23rd volume of the newspaper with a harsh and critical letter that was not intended to his readers, but rather to his writers. The innocent and direct title of the letter, ‘a matter to our authors’, did not testify to the rage and frustration that appe...

This chapter explores the geography of postal practices. The early nineteenth-century establishment of centralized state postal services, the expansion of literacy, and the reduction in paper and mailing costs gave rise to a popular and public postal system. This postal system and more importantly the people’s postal practices created epistolary sp...

This chapter analyzes the increasing unifying role of education and the attempts of state authorities to control the geography of higher education. The study of educational infrastructures reveals that higher education institutes were dependent on older institutes, thus limiting the possibilities of spatial reforms. As a result, state authorities e...

German society in the mid-nineteenth century had become extremely mobile; people moved from place to place by foot, horses, postal carriages, ships, and trains, in increasing quantities. Chapter 9 examines railway journeys in order to interpret the boundaries of travel in the German world. The analysis of statistical travel data reveals a self-proc...

This chapter discusses two types of migration in the German world: mass emigration, primarily toward America and the migration of foreign students who studied in the various German states. Migration patterns, which include the volume, destinations, and points of origin of immigrants, are used as evidence of the quality and vitality of cross-border...

This chapter concerns German railway cartography in the mid-nineteenth century and its effects on spatio-political perceptions (This chapter is a revised version of Segal, Zef. 2016. ‘Regionalism and Nationalism in the Railway Cartography of Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany,’ Imago Mundi 68(1): 46–61). The evolution of a railway system in Germany, fr...

This chapter discusses the establishment of gendarmerie forces and a passport regime in the 1810s and customs controls in the 1830s, as means to demarcate the territory. It explains the rationale of the initial state plans in terms of territorial demarcation and the inconsistent execution. By analyzing GIS mappings of the location of the various un...

The process of nationalization in the five medium-sized German states required a specific attention to the capital city and the state borders, the ‘heart’ and ‘skin’ of the emerging Geo-Body. The strengthening of the capital city was an inseparable part of the symbolic unification of the population around the center of power and territory, yet it e...

The cartographic naturalization of the state territory requires a formation of a distinct visual image that can be detached from its spatial context. Maps create logos by reinstating and replicating a certain spatial context. This is done through the use of colors and graphical measures, erasure of ‘unnecessary’ geographical and political elements,...

This chapter highlights the findings of the book and stresses the interdependence of the three parts, which are neither hierarchical, nor are they isolated. It separates between the historical results, which show the integration of Bavaria and Saxony, the disintegration of Hanover and Württemberg, and the lack of German unity, and the theoretical r...

Nineteenth-century communication and transportation technologies and infrastructures revolutionized the way people perceived space and spatial ties. The new postal systems, steamships, railway lines, and later telegraph lines made distances shorter, less time-consuming, and cheaper. Many more people could travel, migrate, and dispatch messages to m...

This book analyses the development of German territorial states in the nineteenth century through the prism of five Mittelstaaten: Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg, and Baden. It asks how a state becomes a place, and argues that it involves a contested and multi-faceted process, one of slow and uneven progress. The study approaches this questi...

This paper discusses the role of capital cities in the construction of nineteenth-century German states. It describes the significant efforts that were put into strengthening new capital cities, such as Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart and Hanover, especially due to the polycentric nature of German society, and making them more central in citizens' lives...

This article concerns German railway cartography in the mid-nineteenth century and its effects on spatio-political perceptions. The evolution of a railway system in Germany, from isolated single routes into national and ultimately international networks, has been customarily linked to the political issue of unification in 1871. The infrastructural...

German Capital Cities: Empowerment and State Construction, 1815- 1866. The end of the Holy Roman Empire marked the beginning of a new era in the German world. Hundreds of small political entities turned into 37 sovereign states, each one with an individual tale of integration and territorialization. An important role in these processes was that o...

Spatial integration, in general, is related to spatial-diffusion processes without barrier effects-that is, without geographical discontinuities between contiguous areas that would indicate regional gaps. Since this article examines the postal structure not as an institution but as a representation of social integration, its primary focus is on loc...