Digital Yiddish: Building 21st Century Linguistic Tools from Literary Sources

This project will produce public resources for the Yiddish language in conjunction with digitization of its literature. The project merges the ac- tivities of Kamusi, which uses a variety of technological avenues to gather and distribute data for numerous languages, and Refoyl's Yiddish Re- sources, which develops software and materials specifically for Yiddish. Activities include OCR of major Yiddish texts and public participation to convert that information to manipulable linguistic data. The project will yield a knowledge base and digitized corpus that can serve for preserva- tion of past and present forms of the knowledge, for historical and com- parative linguistic research, for advanced technological tools, for bilingual communications with scores of other languages, and as a platform for teaching the Yiddish language.