Wrangling Metadata in the Multilingual Landscape of Jewish Central and Eastern Europe

• In Event: Mapping Jewish Experiences

Abstract

Anyone familiar with Jewish history of Central and Eastern Europe will likely be aware of the many names places have. What is Vilnius, Lithuania today is still “Vilna” to many Jewish Americans, and has half a dozen other pronunciations in other languages of the region. Entering the name of a shtetl or hometown passed down through the generations in a Jewish family into GoogleMaps will likely draw a blank since the Yiddish name may sound nothing like the Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, or Latvian name of the place. City, town, and shtetl names have come up in almost every of the 1,300+ oral histories recorded as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. Thanks to funding from the National Endowments for the Humanities, we have generated a document with over 750 Central and Eastern European geo-terms that come up in the interviews. We are already finding this data invaluable for internal metadata use and are working towards longer-term goals of enriching search results by layering displayed names over synonym tables on the back-end of our website to link alternative place names, enhancing mapping capabilities on our website, and making the dataset available more widely. In this talk, we will discuss our process of cross-referencing and aligning geographic metadata from a wide array of sources from institutional mainstays such as Getty to crowd-sourced projects such as JewishGen, from Jewish Studies specific such as Encyclopedia Judaica to Yiddish Studies specific such as YIVO Yiddishland. The result is a growing thesaurus of alternate names and spellings of geographic locations mentioned in our collection that represent both the cultural and linguistic diversity of the area as well as the shifting geopolitical landscape in this region. We will also examine the opportunities and limitations of implementing mapping capabilities within a pre-existing website structure. Carole Renard (Yiddish Book Center) co-authored this paper.

Authors

• Christa Patricia Whitney, Yiddish Book Center

• Carole Renard, Yiddish Book Center