With the advent of information technology, numerous initiatives have been launched by cultural heritage, academic and commercial institutions aiming at digitization, organization, visualization and analysis of historical information of a given place. These projects usually utilize GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to represent and analyze a restricted range of spatial data, such as archaeological findings or landmarks from a single information source. To take the emerging field of spatial history to the next level—the spatial digital humanities—the traditional spatial data should be enriched with cultural and social data from heterogeneous resources, such as historical books, administrative documents, images, and multimedia objects, and allow for deeper analysis of the historical places’ cultural and social context. To this end, ontologies and modern semantic web technologies should be combined with GIS technology to enable easy data standardization and integration, uniform data modeling, open-access and cross-project data sharing and analysis. In this paper, we review this combined approach and its utilization attempts in recent spatial digital humanities projects for cities from all over the globe while discussing the field’s main common challenges and their possible solutions.

LISROP (Land of Israel Study and Research Online Platform) is an online, bilingual, English-Hebrew, integrative platform (under construction) aiming to allow scholars and interested non-academics to review a vast amount of archaeological and historical data from the land of Israel, explore it and dissect in various ways, and then analyze it using sophisticated GIS tools, some of which were specifically developed for the platform. The platform can be used for various types of studies and can be expanded thematically and spatially beyond its current limits by incorporating additional databases and applications and providing information on nature, culture, and heritage, furthering study and research into these areas. The paper briefly presents the project’s background, history, development, and current aims. It then describes the platform and its components, including the geographical foundations on which the data is studied, the archaeological and historical data it incorporates, and the various GIS components it includes. The paper then outlines the platform’s potential, capacity to advance research on several levels, and expected relevance for non-academics. Toward the end, the paper briefly describes some of the major challenges we encountered in our work and potential avenues for expanding the platform.

This paper describes the vision, framework, challenges, and implementation of the Jerusalem History Knowledge Center (JHKC) initiated by the late Ronnie Ellenblum. The center’s establishment was configured as a joint project of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), the National Library of Israel (NLI), and the Israel Antiquities Authorities (IAA). Its primary mission and challenge were to establish a long-term digital infrastructure constituting an open-access platform about the history of Jerusalem, which draws on diverse sources, such as archaeological records, historical documents, pilgrims’ accounts, old and new photographs and videos, architectural reconstructions, etc. The first stages included the classification of databases about two sites in Jerusalem: the Citadel—Tower of David and the Damascus Gate. As part of this work, we implemented a unified search in interdisciplinary databases regarding a specific geographical area or a single monument. The center’s products will eventually operate at two levels: at the research level, facilitating work in the fields of history, archeology, art, geography, social sciences, etc., and at the popular level, serving the general public.

The “spatial turn” in the humanities has led to increased exploration of spatial perspectives. This shift inspired the ALMA Digital Atlas of the Ancient Jewish World project, which aims to develop a comprehensive digital-analytical atlas. It is intended to serve as a tool for geographical and comparative research on ancient Jewish geography, spanning the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. The atlas builds on two elemental entity types: place, which pertains to regions or settlements, and source, which addresses pertinent historical texts, archaeological finds, or both, allowing for the robust comparison of geographical information from various sources. This project seeks not only to address existing historical and geographical questions but also to raise new ones, offering fresh insights into geographical perception in antiquity.

In the course of a seven-year-long project (2014–2021), all published architectural, archaeological, geographical, textual, and epigraphical data pertaining to early Christian churches (n=715) and monasteries (n=306) were collated in a comprehensive digital database. The objectives of the project and the structure of the database are described in detail, including an appendix outlining the templates of each section of the digital corpus (Appendix A). A designated section of the corpus is devoted to preconceived queries, which permit the generation of specific reports pertaining to geographical distribution, architectural components and members, index of terms mentioned in the inscriptions, and more. A Google search function covering the entire database is also available. At present, the database is undergoing the final stages of proofreading. When completed, it will be fully open to the public via the internet.

The digitization of Jerusalem Architectural Archives was a practical heritage documentation project establishing a platform for studying architecture and design in modern Jerusalem. The project ventured to locate, digitize, and catalog official and personal documents concerning the city’s modern development. The resulting database consists of elaborate Excel tablesincorporating seven archival and working collections produced under various regimes: Ottoman, British, and Israeli. Striving to divulge the material to as many readers as possible and facilitate multiple readings of the city’s history, we questioned the terms and categories traditionally used for tagging and cataloging documents in the historiography of Jerusalem. Technically, the main challenges we faced were inconsistent and incomplete cataloging of the original archives, obtaining document publishing rights, and creating a sustainable platform. More substantial challenges pertained to the cataloger’s interpretative role in objectively representing the information emerging from the various documents and the archive’s role as a mediator in research and practice.