Yiddish OCR: An Account of Some Amazing Finds

After nearly a decade in development, the Yiddish Book Center has launched a new website that will allow users to search the full text of nearly 11,000 scanned Yiddish books. This optical character recognition (OCR) technology will enable searches that used to take years to occur in a matter of seconds, revolutionizing research in Jewish history, literature, linguistics, ethnography, and genealogy. Sophia Shoulson, the Yiddish Book Center's 2019–2020 Richard S. Herman Fellow and a senior fellow working in bibliography, joins us to talk about how she's been using Yiddish OCR for her research and some of the amazing finds she's made.