When I first heard of the company Kynetx a few days ago, the initial image that popped into my head was that of KNEX, my brother’s favorite childhood toy. As I delved into the Kynetx website and learned more about the project, however, I began to understand the function of this program and how it can help JPS advertise its less well-known products.
I recently finished reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”.
The Long Tail is a statistical property which says that the majority of the population rests in the tail of probability distribution. The reason the Long Tail works is because today, with the accessibility of information, society demands variety. This demand stimulates the need to have a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities, in addition to a small number of popular items available in large quantities. Throughout The Long Tail, Anderson uses music as his prime example. The example works like this: Music is the general category. Within “Music” there are various genres that range from highly popular (Rock/Pop) to more unique (African Folk). Anderson explains that because there is a higher demand for Rock/Pop, it is at the front of the tail, while African Folk, which sells fewer albums, falls somewhere on the falling part of the tail.
Though the Tagged Tanakh (TT) was conceived by JPS, the idea behind it was inspired by important people in academic, technological, and Jewish fields of study. Over the next few weeks I’m going to write a series of blog posts, each focusing on one of these individuals and how their work impacts the TT. My first subject is Dr. Janet Murray, a woman whose work has deep implications for the Tagged Tanakh.
Murray is an accomplished scholar in more than one field. She is internationally recognized for her work in game theory and interactive design. As the Director of the MA and PhD programs in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, Murray is also a member of their Experimental Game Lab (EGL). A prolific writer, Murray’s work is published in multiple languages, and in spring 2000, she was named to the Board of Trustees at the American Film Institute.
Hello! My name is Becca Stern and I’m the newest addition to the JPS Interactive team. As the JPSI Summer Intern, I’ll be writing and contributing to the JPS Interactive blog and the Tagged Tanakh all summer, and I could not be more excited!
A little about myself: I’m a rising junior at the University of Pittsburgh where I’m studying English Literature and Children’s Literature. I’m a native of Philadelphia (go Phils!) and I love to eat and travel—especially at the same time.
One of my first assignments at JPS was to sort through JPS Interactive’s bookmarks. Using a web tool called Delicious, JPS staff have tagged and gathered interesting tidbits of information found online that relate to Judaism and technology. After hours of exploring three years’ worth of links (which I guess are kind of like digital bread crumbs), I started to conceptualize the path JPS Interactive and the Tagged Tanakh are forging.
David Siegel would have us believe that the era of pushy salesmen and invasive marketing is coming to a close. With the dawn of the Semantic Web, pulling will become the more active verb (and business strategy) of the 21st century.
What does this have to do with Jewish educational technology? How does the idea of pull affect Jewish publishers, educators, and other community leaders?
The Tagged Tanakh soft launch coincided with Tu B’Shvat at the end of January 2010. It was a quiet affair with not much pomp and circumstance. We released the site a tad prematurely, but we were so excited to get people tagging. We wanted to release early and release often.
In one year’s time, the Tagged Tanakh (TT) went from prototype to its first full release. Sure we couldn’t include all the cool features we originally wanted to, but we had made something unique – an online relational database of the English translation of the Jewish Bible.
The TT allows users to contribute remarks and tags to words and verses in the Bible. Vetted content provided by scholars and JPS staff is available alongside ideas and questions contributed by general users. People can create feeds that follow specific topics of interests or follow feeds made by other people. Feel free to take a tour!
We hope that it’s more than just hype, we want the Tagged Tanakh to be useful.
In the book Authenticity, the authors describe “rendering experiences” for customers as the foundation of this new emerging economy. Digital Anthropology jobs and community management tools will drive the 21st-century economy. Eventually, we’ll all climb aboard the Cluetrain and ride off into brighter, more lucrative future.
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.
The Tagged Tanakh is composed of two main types of content:
Content provided by scholarly experts and JPS staff including:
Excerpts from JPS books
Scholarly remarks
Glossaries and pointers to traditional Jewish commentaries
Related data (maps, images, videos and cross-references)
along with
User-generated content contributed by the masses including:
Personal commentaries
Questions and concerns
Keyword Tags
The content strategy of the Tagged Tanakh enables people to search the Torah for words and concepts that did not originally appear in the Jewish Bible (like environmentalism or sexism) and then connect those ideas to sources found in Jewish tradition.
By identifying who contributes content to the Tagged Tanakh users can control their experience by filtering information according to the credentials and/or background of the contributor.
“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:
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.
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.
Building the Tagged Tanakh is an amazing team that blends proven experience and cutting edge talent. The Lead Tech Team is Phase Six
Phase Six is an integrated front-end and back-end Web applications boutique firm. Their blend of technical prowess and creative style is evident in their work with clients like Disney, Chronicle Books, and SideReel.com.
Working with Phase Six and JPS is consultant CTO Sze Wong. With over ten years of experience working on massive technology projects, including a $50 million accounting software system for Fannie Mae, Mr. Wong provides technical oversight and documentation, ensuring that industry standards and best practices are included in the Tagged Tanakh’s development.
The JPS Technical Advisory Board (TAB) offers guidance and strategic direction on all technical matters relating to the TT project. The TAB brings to the TT project extensive experience in software development and online business and management, giving JPS a distinct advantage. The TAB will provide counsel on issues pertaining to user experience, Web applications, and risk management.
Darim Online is a proven leader in the digital Jewish world with over ten years of experience providing Internet strategy and technology consulting for synagogues, Jewish day schools, camps, federations and other organizations. The Darim Learning Network for Educators is a new program for congregational and other educators who work with middle and high school students. It builds on the success of the Darim Learning Network for Synagogues, which includes more than 175 participants from over 85 congregations.
CET is an NGO dedicated to the advancement of education in Israel, in the Jewish world, and around the globe. In its 37 years of activity, CET has invested significant resources in carrying out its social mission, and has established its expertise and reputation as a content developer, advocate of advanced technologies, and as a leader of next generation learning and pedagogy.
