Klezmer Archive Blog

Klezmer Archive DHAG Phase I White Paper

The Klezmer Archive Team
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
and its network of contemporary and historical people. Taking individual melodies as
the primary artifact, the digital archive will integrate existing tools and archival methods in novel ways to facilitate search and discovery rooted in the needs of its contemporary heritage community. Tooling and frameworks developed for the Klezmer Archive project will be available for heritage communities to adapt for their own domain-specific uses, and will be particularly useful for the preservation and study of intangible cultural heritage.

The project team is exploring newly-available open source knowledge engine technologies for organizing and validating heritage-based information, and is the first team to explore use of these tools in the Digital Humanities. The KA team is also one of the first (to our knowledge) to experiment with modeling music data directly in a knowledge graph.

The Klezmer Archive Project (KA) has completed a period of research and development supported by a two-year Phase I NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from 2021- 2022. The primary goal of this phase was to produce a MVP (minimum viable product) plan identifying the core technical elements that must be integrated together to achieve the tool that could be called the Klezmer Archive as described in the project scope.

Outcomes from this phase include this white paper, a system architecture plan, a dev-blog, a landing page for the project, numerous public presentations, and a published journal article.