"A good word for shund," an essay by Khayem Libermen, from Forverts, August 3, 1924.
How does popular Yiddish literature work? And why is it called shund, trash? This database has a somewhat unconventional definition of shund...
Shundlikht is a Python program (Jupyter Notebook) that, once run locally, automatically transcribes, translates (if you want), and collates the pdf images associated with each installment of a given work in the Shund.org database. The images associated with each installment are hosted by the National Library of Israel (NLI).
"Mother's Portrait" by Dovid Brown, Forverts, December 6, 1914
What can a simple word search tell us about the image of mothers in the pages of the Forverts?
With the Shund.org corpus approaching 25,000 installments (from a single publication!), exploratory analysis has become a daunting prospect. Distant viewing and textual analysis techniques provide us a way forward, but there are emerging alternatives to help us make sense of large and unwieldy data.
"The Love of a Drug Store" by Yenta Serdatsky, Forverts, January 11, 1920
What a simple search in shund.org can tell us about 127 short stories by Yenta Serdatsky and how to measure literary importance.
How might one glimpse the contents of a text corpus, to generate preliminary research questions that might inform downstream search and more sophisticated analyses related to topics, sentiments, parts of speech, or named entities? One way is to engage with the full text of a work in virtual reality, using Longhand.
