University of California, Davis Samuel Armistead $182,715
DLI Phase 2: Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews: A Multi-tiered Extensible Digital Archive
The Armistead-Silverman collection at the University of California at Davis contains fifteen hundred "Judeo-Spanish" narrative ballads, together with other genres, including lyric poetry, folktales, proverbs, and riddles. The oral traditions preserved in the language also known as ``Ladino'' but called ``Judeo-Spanish'' in this grant proposal, were gathered by Professors Farmstead, Katz, and Silverman during the years 1957-1980 from informants from Bosnia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Israel, Spain, and the United States. This material is the largest collection of Judeo-Spanish oral literature in North America, and one of the three largest in the world. The Judeo-Spanish oral tradition preserves a cultural legacy for the study of Sephardic Jewry as well as for researchers in the history of pan-Hispanic and pan-European balladry. This oral tradition, with roots extending back into Middle Ages, provides a unique matrix within which Hispanic written literature was created.
The technical goals of the project are to continue conversion of this material to a multi-media digital corpus so that these materials can be made ,more widely available, with increased access analytic capabilities. Textual transcriptions will be tagged using a number of markup methods, especially XML and a digital audio database will be created. A variety of approaches will be tested to make the archive fully extensible. The project will build on earlier research products from other digital libraries projects, including the University California, Berkeley digital libraries group.
