Klezmer Institute Awarded $150,000 Phase II NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the Klezmer Archive Project 2023-2025
Newcomer Jewish culture nonprofit awarded third NEH grant in four years.
Yonkers, NY: The Klezmer Institute is pleased to announce that it has been awarded one of thirteen Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) from the NEH in this funding round. The two-year $150,000 award is for Phase II of the Klezmer Archive project.
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.
“For cultural communities that are interested in maintaining continuity with the past within a living tradition, the ability to capture the accumulated knowledge of current practitioners as well as documentation made in the past is an important potential tool.”
Key Personnel: Project Director, Christina Crowder (CT); Project Coordinator, Clara Byom (NM); Project Team: Eléonore Biezunski, PhD (NY), Dan Kunda Thagard (Montreal), Yonatan Malin, PhD (CO), Andrew Parisi (TX), Max Rothman (MA), Matthew Stein (NY), Schyler VerSteeg (MA).
In Phase II the project team will begin prototyping and testing core components of the archive tool, will continue ontology development, and will develop a front-end web toolkit among other expected outcomes of this granting period.
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The Klezmer Institute’s position as a newcomer, outside of typical academic structures and GLAM spaces, and the project team’s deep understanding of the core problems the archive seeks to solve, has allowed the team to do a lot of blue-sky thinking in its approach. Even as the project builds on and learns from existing projects and tools, the team’s Phase I research revealed that the project is unique, ambitious, and cutting-edge on multiple fronts:
>> The size of this project is monumental and no project of similar scale aims to combine musical search with both expert and user-contributed metadata and commentary.
>> This project will be the first (to our knowledge) to model music data directly into a knowledge graph.
>> To our knowledge, this will be the first project in the digital humanities space that will use inference/reasoning.
>> Musics of Oral Tradition (MoOT) will be the first ontology that highlights the transmission and transformation of intangible cultural heritage as it is shared through communities.
The Klezmer Archive Project (KA) team 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 included a white paper, a system architecture plan, a dev-blog, a landing page for the project, numerous public presentations, and a published journal article.
“As a music theorist whose interests lie in computational and empirical methods, I am excited by the fact that an oral tradition such as Klezmer music … could be made available for future researchers and students to explore. This will change the conversations we have about how tonality, folk music, improvised music, and oral traditions work in music, and is an astonishingly important project ….”
The project team draws on a deep well of support from the klezmer community and feels deeply obligated to honor the work of musicians and scholars across centuries who have been our in-person mentors and historical inspiration.
The Klezmer Archive has the potential to fundamentally impact the way archives, libraries, research institutions, and communities of scholar-practitioners document, preserve, and research the artistic expression of cultures and the people connected to them.
Find further information at the Project Page and the project Dev-blog. Download the KA Phase I White Paper Here.
“This will be a huge advance in recognition and visibility for eastern European Jewish music studies within our circle and out to the larger world.”
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The Klezmer Institute is a digital-first organization founded to support Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming.
*Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
The National Endowment for the Humanities and Klezmer Institute together:
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