The imagined geography of HaZefira

This project establishes an open, searchable database of toponyms (place names) that appear in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Zefira during three pivotal publication windows: February–July 1862, August–December 1874, and August–December 1883. Its aim is to document the newspaper’s geographical imagination by systematically recording every place referenced in its pages. By doing so, the database offers scholars and the public a structured way to examine how Ha-Zefira constructed a textual geography—how it invoked places, linked them to one another, and embedded them within contemporary discourses of news, science, politics, and Jewish communal life. Beyond serving as a reference tool, the database forms a foundational resource for analyzing the imagined geographies of Hebrew journalism and for advancing new digital methods in the spatial study of nineteenth-century print culture. All toponyms were manually identified and tagged in Recogito; each entry includes an anchor marking the exact character position at which the toponym begins. The accompanying network metrics derive from co-occurrence relationships, defined here as pairs of toponyms that appear within 800 characters of each other (approximately one paragraph).