Over the course of this summer, I propose to apply digital humanities methods to the text of the American Jewish Year Book (AJYB) to support research for my dissertation, “The 1970s’ New Jewish Politics: Grassroots Orthodox Activism in the U.S.” Working with PDFs of the AJYB, fully and freely accessible online, my proposed summer project will transform the AJYB’s raw text into structured data. The project’s first output will include a new dataset of Jewish population across the U.S. and Canada for each decade across the 20th century, and a census-oriented map of this population. I have already transcribed population counts for the years 1950, 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1990, creating 3,373 rows of data. Tasks for this component involve transcription, data “cleaning,” and matching Jewish population entries with geographic coordinates and with general U.S. population counts for the same geographic areas and decades. The project’s second output will be open-ended textual analysis, based on digitally parsing approximately 30,550 AJYB pages from 1948 to 1995, focusing on Jewish Orthodox organizations, personalities, and events. The AJYB’s publisher is not aware of any comparable mapping, data visualization or textual analysis project based on the AJYB. With the support of the Digital Humanities Graduate Student Summer Fellowship, I hope to make the AYJB’s demographic information available to scholars and the wider public for the first time as structured clean data, and to gain an unprecedented overview of Orthodox activities in the late twentieth century.

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