Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.087 August 17, 1994 1) Electronic On-Line _LCAAJ_ Archives (Andrew Sunshine) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 17 Aug 94 15:38 EDT From: ansur@cuvmb.Columbia.edu Subject: Electronic On-Line _LCAAJ_ Archives 1. I'd like to open and close this message by thanking all those who have so far responded (either on Mendele or to Mikhl Herzog and me) to my previous posting on the subject of a proposal to transform the Archives of the _Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry_ into an electronic on-line data archives. 2. Re: Ellen Prince's suggestion that the goals of computerizing the LCAAJ Archives be streamlined at this stage, "leaving out, for the first stage at least, the dialectological tagging/addressing." There's no question that the task of preserving the _LCAAJ_'s interviews on other media is extremely urgent since the reel-to- reel tapes on which they were originally recorded are anywhere from 20 to 35 years old and no systematic set of duplicate tapes exist. If measures to preserve the tapes are not taken soon, then we will begin to lose interviews; in losing interviews we lose what may be the only systematic representation we have of the Yiddish of particular locations in Europe. The preservation of all 600 Atlas interviews (an estimated 6000 hours of tape) both in a reel-to-reel analog tape master and in a digitized, computer-stored version is a task that cannot wait. However, our intention in digitizing the interviews is to combine the goal of preservation with that of access. To be sure, to tag all 600 interview/6000 recorded hours in addition to digitizing them is a humongous task. (It is, more precisely, an OPEN-ENDED task, as I shall explain shortly.) While the preservation task is paramount, it also seems to be in the interest of our long range goals to demonstrate the viability of electronic access. Thus, our intention, for the more-or-less immediate future, is to do the tagging for 100 of the interviews, as well--in effect, to create a kind of usable skeleton of the Yiddish language map to be filled in progressively, but perhaps never to be completed so long as there are students of Yiddish. Ellen Prince's note suggests that she sees a distinction between dialectological and other kinds of tagging of the data, e.g., syntactic. If there is anything to such a distinction, then perhaps my reference to "covert dialectological issues" in my original posting was an unfortunate choice of words. In other words, the _LCAAJ_ data is intended to be representative of Yiddish in its geographic variation, and accordingly lends itself to such study-- but not only to such study. It is amenable (in principle) to whatever interests researchers bring to their scrutiny of the data. Indeed, it has already happened at least once in the course of processing the interviews that issues not found on the original list (the so-called "Index to the Dialectology" or ID) and not used in the construction of the field questionnaire but suggested by the data were added as matters worthy of future exploration. (_LCAAJ_ Volume II due out this fall includes the original "Index to the Dialectology" and the addenda [Chapter V].) And it will certainly happen again. (It is in part because we anticipate such additions and amendments to be made on a continual basis as the data is intensively studied that database will be an on-line resource, rather than a fixed entity to be disseminated on CD Rom. Continual development of the archives is very much a part of the conception.) In short, we look forward to the introduction of whatever sort of syntactic tagging you may have in mind (it hardly needs to be mentioned that the world of syntactic theory has changed since the original list of issues was drafted by Uriel Weinreich in 1959). All of this is perhaps nothing more than a long-winded version of Dovid Braun's remark: "... the dialectological aspect of the Atlas ... is the core of the Atlas!"--using the word "dialectological" to refer to the conceptual/analytical categories for studying the interviews. In other words, the field questionnaire was designed to elicit short answers on a variety of topics, both overt (Q: VOSER HOBN YIDN GEREDT? A: YIDISH) and covert (ID 110: typical development of Yiddish Proto-vowels 32, 33; and ID 302: functional status of _j_ before _i_--both of these bearing on the renditions of YIDISH). (Compare the rather different focus of oral history interviews and the consequent structure of oral history texts.) While Dovid's contribution to the discussion is basically on the mark, it doesn't take into account (because I hadn't been sufficiently explicit on this point in my original posting) our intention of including the audio recordings in the on-line database and of affixing the tags to segments of these recordings (and secondarily to the transcripts). Thus, accurate though his comments may be about Atlas transcriptions in general and the absence of transcriptions longer than a phrase in particular, they don't in themselves disqualify Professor Prince's interest in running text. Moreover, if the audio recordings are available, then there seems to be no reason not to turn to the interviews as a possible source of running text--whether that is taken to refer to the text of individual responses to questions or to an interview conceived as a whole text. Even so, the Atlas is, as Dovid aptly characterizes it, a "plotting tool," rather than a corpus of running text. That is, the data lends itself to the sort of research in which the investigator wants to know how a given question (or perhaps set of questions) was answered at all interview sites, rather than to research in which the investigator wants to know how all the questions were answered at a single location. However, the real-time sequence of information on the recordings as they are now stored would better serve the purpose of the latter (hypothetical approach) than the former. The best way to facilitate retrieval of parallel responses to single questions (or parallel instances of a given linguistic phenomenon) is to introduce paths of electronic access. Among other things, this will benefit those working on further volumes of the book-form Atlas. 3. See 1. Andrew Sunshine ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.087 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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