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This project is the hopeful beginning of an online database of Yiddish poetry. It aims to:
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enrich the already substantial digital presence of Yiddish literature
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present Yiddish poetry in an interactive and provocative way by:
- accompanying each poem with a recorded reading of the Yiddish originals
- offering the translation at the click of a button
- supplying the author's relevant biographical information
- supplying relevant and specific contextual background
- referencing sources for more reading and online exploration
- providing visual aids to offer new insight or highlight the work's energy
- offer lexicographic analysis tools to enrich (and possibly complicate) the study of this poetry
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embrace crowd-sourcing as the main model of contribution to the databases corpora
All original work for the purpose of this project is open source. If your work is hosted here and you have a problem with it please let us know and it will be removed ASAP. If you would like to add to and improve the project, host your own version, modify the analytical functions, or simply download the database you are welcome to.
- The left margin contains a photo relevant to the poem, or the poem's historical context, as well as a short text on the same theme.
- The right margin contains a photo of the poet and a biographical blurb.
- The foot contains links to resources.
- The center houses the poem and the recorded reading.
Any photo can be enlarged by clicking it. Every page has translation buttons to toggle between English and Yiddish. The main page allows you to browse the poems by year, poet, and poem. Click a Yiddish word and various queries are suggested to you. Clicking them will return a graph.
The database can be downloaded by navigating to the About page. We hope to soon enable all enthusiastic individuals to contribute directly to the database. In the meantime, if you would like to see the poem collection grow faster, please email us--there is much to do!
Currently the website offers very limited analytical functions. Once tokens are selected, one may:
- see their usage in all poems across the years
- see their usage in all poems across the poets
- see their distribution within a particular poem
- see their usage in all poems by a particular poet
- see their usage by a particular poet across the years
Thus, only 5 functions are available to the end user. Furthermore the way the results are displayed are fixed, and tokens are (sort of) capped at 5. Also, the Yiddish orthography in the database in most cases matches that of the poem's source, and without some kind of normalizer/stemmer, the results of the analysis are somewhat off. We hope to soon implement some kind of remedy for this (instead of standardizing spelling--but if you have an argument in favor of standardization we'd be happy to hear, imagine though knowing the answer to "when was the number of poets spelling shabes 'שאַבעס' at its greatest? Or after the soviet union who persisted in spelling shabes this way?").
We would love to hear of new ideas, new functions, options we should implement, and anything you might think about the project. We encourage you to fork this repository and submit your changes and improvements. But you may also download the database and our python code and do whatever you wish. We are also here to help in this regard.
We will soon describe how you might host your own version of this project. In the meantime you may find it here:
We hope you will contribute!
We need:
- more poems
- poet bios and poem contexts
- photos
- ideas (with or without their implementation)
- comments and corrections
For particulars please email us.
Stuff we are working on right now
- מער װי לידער
- exhibits
- general search feature
- whatever this was, we've accomplished it
- POS tagger