Zef Segal is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies. He is a historian of modern Europe and a digital humanities scholar whose work focuses on the relationships between media, communication infrastructures, and spatial knowledge in the nineteenth century. His research examines how space, mobility, and communication were conceptualized and constructed through media such as newspapers, cartography, and travel literature. His work challenges static understandings of territory by emphasizing dynamic, networked, and relational forms of spatial organization.
Segal’s work in digital humanities has developed from an early focus on mapping and GIS to network analysis and visualization, and more recently to textual analysis and digitization. His current research investigates nineteenth-century transnational networks of Hebrew and American periodicals, using methods such as textual reuse detection and topic modeling. This work (together with Menahem Blondheim of the College of Management) has been supported by the Israel Science Foundation since 2022. He is also developing a project on AI-assisted analysis of spatial language in literary texts, alongside broader work on integrating large language models into historical research and designing AI-based approaches to the study of historical sources.
Beyond his research, Segal is active in the international digital humanities community. He serves on the board of Historical Network Research and is a partner in the Pelagios Network. He is also a member of the editorial board of Historiography in Mass Communication and serves as Review Editor for JHistory at h-net.org.
Selected publications:
Segal, Zef. “Fake News in an Early Hebrew Newspaper:
Sensationalist Journalism within an Objective Journal, HaTzfira 1874”, Journalism History 49 (2023), 300-315.
Segal, Zef.
19th century Hebrew Press Reuse Network. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-06-01.
Computational Literacy for the Humanities: Mathematics and Programming in Context, Routledge 2025 (with Nurit Melnik).
The Political Fragmentation of Germany: Formation of German States by Infrastructures, Maps, and Movement, 1815-1866, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Motion in Maps, Maps in Motion: Mapping Stories and Movement through the Time, Amsterdam University Press 2020. (with Bram Vannieuwenhuyze)
“Diasporic Cartography and the Limits of National Territoriality: The Jabotinsky-Perlman Atlas (1925)",
Nations and Nationalism (2026), 1-10.
“The Fantastic Geographies of Ikhtayyi: On Space and Place in Emile Habibi's Novel" in Christian Lenz, Sarah Neef and Kristin Aubel (eds.),
Spaces and Places in the Fantastic: Exploring Fantastic Geographies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2025: 53-76.
“Fake News in an Early Hebrew Newspaper: Sensationalist Journalism within an Objective Journal, HaTzfira 1874",
Journalism History 49 (2023), 300-315.