Tagged Tanakh Partnerships
By establishing strategic partnerships with other national Jewish organizations, JPS will be able to maximize the impact and value of the Tagged Tanakh. In 2008, JPS Interactive formed a partnership with Darim Online (US) and the Center for Educational Technology (Israel) to assist in the development of the Tagged Tanakh. Now that Tagged Tanakh 1.0 is live, JPS is eager to form more partnerships with other groups building online communities around Torah study and Jewish learning.
If you are looking for tools and resources to enhance your organization’s connection with Torah and to Jewish tradition please do not hesitate to contact JPS.
The Long Tail: A Long Stretch?
Becca Stern | 08/03/2010
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.
The Long Tail doesn’t just apply to music. It can find a place in any aspect of the world because everything has a Long Tail. In Torah, the Long Tail is anything that doesn’t make it into a Dvar Torah (Sermon) or one of the greatest hits stories like Noah and the Ark or Moses and the Ten Commandments. For example, Eve eating the apple might be at the front of the tail, the Tower of Babel might be toward the middle, and Lot’s daughters seducing him might be toward the end of the tail.
The Tagged Tanakh (TT) helps make the Long Tail of Torah more accessible by incorporating tools to help users find what they want. It has moderation points that allow users to help sort and filter the most relevant content. User profiles enable people to share information about themselves so that they can find other people with similar interests. The mere act of adding tags makes info in the Torah more findable. Thus, the Long Tail of Torah can go on forever as long as people continue contributing remarks and tags to the Tagged Tanakh.
The Delicious Connection Between Judaism and Technology
Becca Stern | 07/07/2010
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.
If you would like to explore the links that JPSI has gathered you can jump to them quickly on the right hand side of this blog thanks to the Delicious widget we’re using. The links range from silly to serious, but they all share one common idea: Judaism and technology are not an oxymoron.
Personally, my favorite link not only connects Judaism to technology, but it adds humor to the mix. I like it because it shows how elements of Judaism can be appropriated and applied to modern society. Try not to laugh too hard…
Another interesting link lets you literally jump into the Bible—without moving away from your iPhone and Gchat. This virtual map tracks all of your favorite characters and their journeys, as told by the Tanakh. This could be a great way to enhance your understanding of the weekly Torah portion.
To sum it up, all of these Jewish-related websites are important because they make Judaism an accessible and relevant part of society.
Stay tuned throughout the summer as I continue to connect Judaism and technology!
Judaism, Free Culture, and the Open Siddur Project
JT | 08/24/2009
“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:
- creativity and innovation;
- communication and free expression;
- public access to knowledge;
- and citizens’ civil liberties.
(Hat Tip to Freeculture.org for the pithy definition!)
Which of course leads bubbies across the world to ask…”Is free culture good for the Jews?”
Aharon Varady, the mind behind the Open Siddur Project, would turn the question on its head, “Have all those rights reserved by copyright law been good for the Jews?”
According to Varady, copyright put a clamp on the free transmission of a lively and vibrant culture that thrived on sharing texts and learning by attribution, as is taught in the Pirkei Avot chapter 6:6, “He who quotes something in the name of the person who said it brings deliverance to the world. For it is said: ‘And Esther said to the King in the name of Mordechai.’ Esther 2:22.”
Varady goes on to say, “It’s important to remember that for most of Jewish history Jews didn’t have copyright law. Jewish discourse was preserved and disseminated orally as a gloss on our written tradition. With the introduction of copyright law in 1923, suddenly Jewish publishers initially invested in the dissemination, transmission, and education of Jewish culture, were deputized in the role of gatekeepers and guardians of intellectual property. Tell me how preserving the rights to authors for their lifetime– plus 70 years– aids in the transmission of Torah from one generation to the next? For a living tradition, it doesn’t.”
“Furthermore, the values of pluralism and multiculturalism reflected in the Jewish laws obligating respect and tolerance for diversity between communal minhagim (customs) and nuschaot (prayer traditions) need to re-emphasized at times such as ours when Jewish culture is threatened by homogenization on the one hand and ignorance on the other.”
The Open Siddur Project, lead by Varady and a small cadre of self-taught hackers is both a social network and a digital archive of public domain prayer materials. As a work in progress it is already starting to ruffle the feathers of old-school publishers who have cornered the market on traditional prayer materials.
Varady hopes his free and open platform for crafting new siddurim reaches “creative Jews inspired by the substance and real diversity of historical and contemporary Jewish practice but who are only interested to the extent that they can actively engage this legacy — a legacy that they’ve heard over and over again is their inheritance. If the Open Siddur Project is doing anything radical it is asking Jews who love their siddur how they would improve it — and then giving them the tools to do so.”
Initiatives like the Open Siddur Project are natural allies with the Tagged Tanakh as both ventures seek to aggregate Jewish content for personal and communal purposes. Providing access to central Jewish texts to an ever-widening constituency of interested people lay at the heart of both web applications. Although, the Tagged Tanakh relies on works that are copyrighted (specifically, JPS’ translation of the Hebrew Bible), we hope to make user contributed comments licensed under creative commons, enabling everyone to take and build on those comments while ensuring a chain of attribution to the original author.
Only a few players exist in the Jewish free culture scene and we require both creative and financial capital. Show your support for the Tagged Tanakh by throwing in a dime to help contribute to the digital future of Judaism. The best way to support the Open Siddur Project is by actively contributing to the project as a volunteer developer, researcher, transcriber, translator, artist, or commentator.
