Tagged Tanakh Related Posts

Just in time for the New Year! At long last, we can share with the world a taste of the Tagged Tanakh (TT) prototype!

The JPS Technical Advisory Board and our Tech Team developed the Tagged Tanakh prototype from January-June of 2009. Core functionality like viewing the English version of the Jewish Bible, adding and viewing tags and remarks, as well as basic moderation and content aggregation are now operational.

“As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.”

So says cultural environmentalist and thought leader, Lawrence Lessig in his book entitled Free Culture. Lessig is an integral part to the copyleft and creative commons movements–legal and social agendas bent on reviewing and renovating the copyright laws that companies like Disney have lobbied long and hard to put in place.

Free culture is succinctly described as one where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way. The free culture movement seeks to develop this culture by promoting four things:

Q: What is business design?
A: An emerging field in economic and creative thinking.
Here’s one definition and here’s an entire blog dedicated to the subject. If you’re looking for a more academic perspective, check out what Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has to say:

Building data sets is expensive and time consuming. That is, if you hire experts. But what if you open your project to anyone who is interested in helping via crowd sourcing?

Our goal at JPS Interactive is to create a positive and meaningful Torah study experience. We believe that if more people can access and interact with the seminal text of the Jewish people, our community will be stronger and more vibrant. As we put the finishing touches on the Tagged Tanakh prototype we inch closer to the next exciting stage of development–User Testing.

In essence, user testing is a process where volunteers use a product and communicate how they feel about it and any problems they might have encountered while using it. Through this process assumptions made during the design phrase are verified or discredited. The data gleaned from user testing then informs the next round of iteration and development.

We continue with our investigation of sites that rival the Tagged Tanakh…

Previously on this blog we discussed the importance of considering our competitors. Continuing in that vein, I took a look at some of the other Bible sites out there to get a better understanding of what is unique about the Tagged Tanakh.

JPS was founded in 1888 to provide Jewish immigrants and their children with books about their heritage in the language of the New World. With the Tagged Tanakh, JPS will provide their great-great grandchildren with dynamic content and resources about their heritage in the language of the new digital world.

JPS staff and advisors are building on 120 years of publishing experience to create new ways of distributing meaningful Jewish content. Our management team blends scholarly insight, seasoned professional skills, and innovation to create something that is both groundbreaking and rooted in Jewish tradition.

Input from scholars, rabbis, and dedicated lay learners is essential to the development of the Tagged Tanakh (TT). From April 2008 to July 2008 five biblical scholars formed the first JPS Scholarly Mark-up Group (SMG) to inform the design of the TT prototype. Under the direction of Rabbi David E.S. Stein, these experts in Rabbinics, Near Eastern Studies, Jewish Intertextuality and Hebrew literary structure provided tags and annotations for Exodus chapters 1-20, as well as for the Song of Songs, to ensure that the Tagged Tanakh is vetted and structured by experts.

Earlier this week, the Tagged Tanakh’s Chief Technical Officer Sze Wong, walked away with a Golden Dot Award for his work on the Twitter Vote Report Project. Given away at the 2009 Politics Online Conference, the Golden Dot Awards honor individuals or organizations whose online initiatives influence the political sphere in significant ways.

If the adage is true and you can measure a person by their friends, then JPS Interactive is a head above the rest due to friends like Lisa Colton and Darim Online. During the 1990s Lisa founded Darim Online and created a large chunk of the synagogue and Jewish non-profit websites in North America. Since then, Lisa and co. have created the premier boutique consulting firm for the professional Jewish world. What Dr. Ruth did for sex education, Lisa is doing for technology and education. She makes it all seem less threatening and in clear and jargon-free presentations Lisa unpacks the mysteries of RSS, how a Facebook Page differs from a Facebook Group, and demonstrates how the tools of social media are changing everything.

So the cat is out of the bag and our little stealth project that was nicely moving under the radar has just been spotted. Is the Tagged Tanakh something revolutionary or just more hype?

This past weekend at the excellent inaugural LimmudPhilly conference, JPS offered a sneak peek at the type of interactivity that will be offered by the Tagged Tanakh. As a group we read aloud 15 verses from Genesis 38 and then three more additional sources were introduced to help the participants recognize that the text could be “unpacked” in a variety of ways.

The first source was an excerpt from Aviva Zornberg’s Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, the second was a Google map of where Adullam is now located, and the last was a funny youtube clip.