From The Forward:
After years of work by a small team of linguists, computer programmers, and volunteer editors, visitors to the Yiddish Book Center’s website can now search millions of pages of digitized Yiddish books with the aid of a newly launched computer program.
The program, Jochre, allows users to search for a specific word or phrase and instantly find every mention of it in more than 10,000 Yiddish books. Previously the books, which have been available online in PDF form for a decade, were only searchable by title and author name. It’s no exaggeration, note Yiddish scholars, to say that the software will revolutionize their field.
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More than anyone, the person responsible for the Yiddish Book Center’s new searchability feature is the linguist and computer programmer Assaf Urieli. A multilingual South-African-born Israeli who lives in France, Urieli runs a software company whose clients include CNES, the French equivalent of NASA. Urieli discovered the Yiddish Book Center’s online collection shortly after it went live in 2009 and decided to create a computer program that would allow him to find words within the collection’s scanned books.
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