Klezmer Archive DHAG Phase I White Paper
August 15, 2023
The Klezmer Archive Project team is delighted to announce the public release of the Klezmer Archive DHAG Phase I White paper. Please be in touch with any questions or comments. We’d love to talk to you about our work. Read more about the project at the Klezmer Archive Page. You can download the PDF here. The Klezmer Archive (KA) project is creating a universally accessible digital archival tool for interaction, discovery, and research on available information about klezmer music ...
Documenting Folklore in Digital Structures — The Fuzzy Genre Boundary Conundrum
October 24, 2022
How do we make sense of conflicting data to arrive at genre designations that resonate with historical practice? How do we account for overlapping or confusing genre classifications, especially when there may be more than one “correct” answer? How do we organize classifications and typologies in such a way that they are useful for search? These questions were posed in a letter from me to librarian Beth Dwoskin on 06/20/2021 and discussed in a team session at the October 2021 retreat. ...
Towards Documenting Human Relationships
June 15, 2022
“A song is the past, present, and future, because all that is life is in these songs. Right now my songs are the present, but they are the future as well - your future. Your children will also sing these songs, and you’ll tell them that once there was an Aunt Bronya, and she sang songs like this!” - Bronya Sakina As part of my internship work at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, I had the honor of digitizing the field recordings of 2015 NEA National Heritage Fellow Michael Alpert— renowned Yiddish singer, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, and researcher. ...
The Fuzzy Tune Boundaries Problem
June 10, 2022
When considering how to accurately structure the dataset of klezmer music, we must answer a surprisingly complex question: how do we define a tune? And how do we best capture our diverse and often conflicting understandings of tunes into a clean, consistent data model? The classic Y.L. Peretz short story “A gilgul fun a nign” tells the tale of a nign as it migrates from town to town, starting off as a Hasidic wedding melody, moving to the Yiddish theater, a circus, back to the Hasidic rebbe, and finally off to America. ...
Welcome to the Klezmer Archive Project Blog!!
June 4, 2022
In our first post we’d like to briefly describe how The Klezmer Archive Project and the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) relate to each other while being distinct projects with different design, audience and objectives. The KMDMP corpus is being used as a “test corpus” for the Klezmer Archive Project, and the crowdsourcing and community-building aspects of the project are informing Klezmer Archive research in the areas of user experience, data ingestion, and ontology building among others. ...
Announcing the Klezmer Archive Project Blog!
September 30, 2021
Howdy friends, Welcome to the new blog for the Klezmer Archive Project. We are excited to start sharing some of the work we have been doing with the project and will use this space to keep members of our community and other intrested folks up to date on what we’re up to!