Archive of the Language and Culture Atlas for Ashkenazic Jewry

Robert Neumann, Ulrike Kiefer
(Förderverein für Jiddische Sprache und Kultur, Düsseldorf)

In the paper we will describe the state of our work on the archive of the
Language and Culture Atlas for Ashkenazic Jewry which is the repository of
an envisaged Internet database and is at the core of the EYDES project
(Evidence of Yiddish Documented in European Societies). The presentation
will illustrate some of the steps achieved so far, such as 1)the creation
of a metadata scheme, or 2)the inputting of the metadata into this scheme.
We will also discuss some of the problems which are emerging in the process
- like the precision of alignment between transcription and sound - as well
as the measures that we have chosen to resolve them:

a)As it seems impossible to realize a hard alignment we focus on achieving
an approximate one; b)For a relevant part of the archive it has proven
unfeasible to achieve a transcription of speech which is suited to EYDES
needs. As a substitute we propose a procedure derived from the textual part
of the questionnaire. Its application, however, is complicated by the
inherent multi-alphabetism of the archive materials, and the resulting
sorting problems for navigation and query have to be resolved.  The
result will be a bi-forked database, partially driven from transcript-based
indexes and partially driven from expanded metadata.  We will
present the first state of the Internet database populated with the first
portion of LCAAJ data (transcriptions, indexes and speech). Furthermore, in
drawing on the LCAAJ data, we will present a proposition to describe spoken
Yiddish as a statistically based grammar - one approach to exploiting the
emerging LCAAJ research lab on the Internet.