JPS to Present at BibleTech Conference in Seattle, March 27-28

On March 28-29, 2009, the annual BibleTech Conference will take place in Seattle, providing an opportunity for “publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study…to explore the intersection of Bible study and technology.”

I will be one of the presenters at the two-day conference and will be presenting a session entitled:

How the Ancient Rabbis Invented Web 2.0 Before Its Time
Here’s the description:

Over 2000 years ago, Jewish sages in Israel invented a new format for interactions with written texts, a kind of proto-hypertext with many similarities to tagging, wikipedia, and the emerging semantic web. Their experiments led to the Talmud, a collaborative 600 year conversation around content; the Jewish commentary tradition, with threads and links; and the notion of a four-tiered content architecture based on scripture. The Jewish Publication Society, the oldest non-profit Jewish publisher in North America, is now developing the Tagged Tanakh, a collaborative learning platform centered around the Hebrew Bible, which will use new digital technologies to update the ancient Rabbis’ dream of “the seventy faces of Torah.” This talk will introduce the audience to this Jewish textual tradition of commentary (biblical hypertext) and how it is being adapted to the social and semantic web by JPS’s new digital initiative.

We’re very excited to enter the mix with other Bible techies and help represent the Jewish perspective in a mostly Christian dominated field.