This project is the hopeful beginning of an online database of Yiddish poetry. It aims to:
- enrich the already substantial digital presence of Yiddish literature
- 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
- embrace crowd-sourcing as the main model of contribution to the databases corpora
The project is currently hosted at https://lider.yiddish.nu. 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 page layout:
- 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, and other languages. The main page allows you to browse the poems by year, poet, and poem. Click a Yiddish word or the button on the bottom-left and various stats about the poem are made visible, and search queries are made available. Clicking them will return a comparative graph.
The entire structure of the site can be cloned from this repo and reproduced and modified to suit other projects. It relies upon a mysql database which can be downloaded from the live site.
A sister admin site, Lider-Admin, handles submissions and provides an interface for moderating, editing, and adding new entries. The admin site also handles the normalizing, tokenizing, and indexing of the corpus, which now relies on a database of tokens, whereas before a python script tokenized the whole corpus for each request from the site.