The Open Siddur Project » Open Siddur Project

Testing Web browsers as Platforms for Hebrew Text Publishing

Aharon Varady — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:49:55 +0000

Given that one important aspiration of the Open Siddur Project is the development of a web application for anyone to edit, maintain, and share the content of a personal prayerbook that they can craft online, I’m very concerned at how well web browsers today display the Hebrew language with all of its diacritical (vowels, cantillation) marks. Indeed, the Open Siddur Project has an international scope, so ostensibly, we wish to support text in every language Jews speak or have ever spoken liturgy or liturgy-related text (the creative content of Jewish spiritual practice). Combine a digital font or fonts that support the full range of human written languages with a platform that correctly displays such fonts, and you have one basis for an excellent potential collaborative publishing platform.

So for the last year, I’ve been working on a series of tests to determine how well some popular and some less well-known web browsers perform in supporting the technology for displaying Hebrew text. In particular, I’m interested to see which browsers are failing to use a web standard called CSS @font-face to properly display Unicode Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics and which contain excellent font logic for diacritical positioning. I’m also keen on seeing which browsers might even be failing at recognizing bidirectional (BIDI) and right-to-left (RTL) text, given that Hebrew is read RTL and it’s not uncommon to find עִבְרִית and other left-to-right (LTR) languages written together with one another.

With these tests I also hoped to find some simple way by which an individual browsing the web could troubleshoot whether the problem is in their browser, their browser’s settings, or in a web page, when they find a web page that is poorly displaying Hebrew. I learned a great deal in the process and so I also made a page for web designer/coders to learn the correct way to craft a web page that will correctly display Hebrew.

This post was originally posted to Aharon’s Omphalos.

Public policy, technology, and copyright in Halakha: a sourcesheet

The Hierophant — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:56:38 +0000

Image: "Copyright Khaf" by Aharon Varady (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Last Sukkot 5771 (2011), Efraim Feinstein shared the sourcesheet for his late night shiur (lesson) on copyright in Rabbinic Halakhah (Jewish law). Efraim’s research adds a great deal of important perspective to our work here on the Open Siddur Project. It provides relevant historical context for our work advocating the adoption of free culture principles and free-culture licenses to facilitate sharing (tachlis) within the Jewish world.

Efraim’s sourcesheet is shared (along with the TEX formatted source code and content for his sourcesheet) via his account on tumblr. For the sake of redundancy and redistribution, here is a direct link to downloading a PDF of his sourcesheet:

DOWNLOAD: PDF | TEX (source).

Welcome to the Open Siddur Project

The Hierophant — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:42:58 +0000

Imagine a printing press and book arts studio shared by everyone in the world looking to design and craft their own siddur.

The Open Siddur Project is building it, online, on the web: a collaborative digital-to-print publishing application where you can make your own siddur, share your work, and adopt, adapt, and redistribute work shared by others -- work intended for creative reuse and inclusion in new siddurim and related works of Jewish spiritual practice.

Imagine a social network focused on publishing built around privacy, collaboration, and a public database and digital library of Jewish liturgy in a format that can easily show historical variations and changes across Jewish traditions, manuscripts, and facsimile editions. Imagine a collection of text and recordings, freely licensed for creative reuse in every language Jews pray in or have ever prayed. Reimagine your siddur, custom tailored to your practice, replete with your insights and those selected from your friends, family, and the complete corpus of Jewish tradition, and a record of your family's and community's minhagim and nusaḥ.

We're not there yet. (Progress towards version 1.0 is tracked on our development roadmap; we're currently at 0.4.4.1).

In the meantime, take a look at the prayers, translations, exercises, art, and recordings that folk are already sharing with free/libre licenses that permit their creative reuse. That means that you can use these works right now in the creation of new siddurim (alas, offline) while we continue developing the Open Siddur web application. There's a list of free/libre and open source software and fonts that can help you do that right now.

Please start a conversation with us, join this project by sharing your own work, introduce yourself on our technical and non-technical discussion lists, and begin to imagine the siddur and spiritual practice you've always wanted. . . . → Read More: Welcome to the Open Siddur Project

From the Jacob Freedman archives: Color-Coded Prayerbook Devised by Rabbi

Aharon Varady — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:15:26 +0000

In our project history, I explain how Rabbi Jacob Freedman’s Polychrome Historical Haggadah was a major inspiration behind my vision for an open siddur project. While researching it’s history I was so pleased to discover that the haggadah Rabbi Freedman managed to self-publish in 1974 to rave reviews, was really only a proof-of-concept for his life’s ambition — a Polychrome Historical Siddur. Rabbi Freedman published a brochure outlining the scope and color of his envisioned siddur in 1969. In the papers of Rabbi Freedman donated to the Open Siddur Project by Harry Aizenstadt and Lisa Rubins, this article printed May 21st, 1972 by Martin Lauer in the Springfield Republican describes the completed siddur that Freedman was never able to publish in his lifetime.

Below is a transcription of Rabbi Freedman’s news clipping of the article by Lauer. Obvious typos and misspellings have been corrected. Thank you to Harry Aizenstadt for contributing this clipping to us.

Color – Coded Prayerbook Devised by Rabbi
By MARTIN LAUER Republican Staff

Religious books like the Bible and scholarly works have traditionally been printed in the manner to which everyone is accustomed. Page after page of type with footnotes or indices taking up a good portion of each sheet has long seemed acceptable.

Now, within a year, a book is expected to come out which will change not only the basic nature of such books but also indicate sources by color code.

Rabbi Jacob Freedman of 68 Calhoun St., Springfield has already produced such a book which he calls “a sample.” A larger book is planned for which “90 per cent of the research is completed,” he said.

The book called a “polychrome historical prayerbook” in Hebrew will be titled “Siddur Bays Yosef” in remembrance of Rabbi Freedman’s late father, the Rev. Joseph Freedman.

Crop of Color Key from the Bookmark included with the Polychrome Historic Haggadah (image not included in original article)

From the color of the print readers can determine the historical period during which the prayer or section of the prayer was written.

Color blocks to the fight and left of the prayer show when the prayer became part of the Jewish service. In English along with the block color code appear the abbreviations of the references.

For an example the color key for the entire book is: black denotes a Biblical soure or era; red denotes the Talmudic Period to 650 C.E. (Christian Era); green, Geonic Period, 650-1075; brown, Middle Ages, 1100-1500; purple, pre-modern, 1500-1800: dark blue, modern era. 1800-1900, and light blue, contemporary, 1900-1970.

The footnotes have the same code.

In March, Rabbi Freedman received an honorary doctorate degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New Yew York, N.Y. He said the seminary recognized him at that time as the originator of the color coded process.

The code’s benefits are many, he said. A reader gains the historical perspective of the prayer, not only an understanding of what the person was undergoing when he wrote it, but also why Jews might have included it in a service or in their prayers.

In another instance, a contemporary work might have its base or words taken from the Bible or that era. References through the color code show the reader that these ideas were phrased in a like manner centuries ago.

Rabbi Freedman said the coding can help persons all the way from elementary grades through the seminary. He said the English footnotes are there so Christian scholars can use the book and note his references.

One example is the Zohar, a prayer said just before taking the Holy Scrolls from the Ark. The color for the entire prayer except for four Hebrew symbols is the same. The four, Aramaic for the idea of truth, show a Biblical reference.

Rabbi Freedman said this is an example of how interwoven some of the prayers are.

He has been a rabbi for 42 years, serving congregations in Chelsea, Fall River, Pittsfield and Long Beach, Calif.

Development Status (08/15/2010)

The Hierophant — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:46:52 +0000

Hello friends,

Check out our progress! This development status update chronicles progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update, February 15, 2010.

If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list. We also recommend following updates on opensiddur.org with our RSS feed. (Just visit this URL with your favorite RSS reader: http://opensiddur.org/feed/ .)

The creative work used in our traditional liturgies is the common cultural heritage of the Jewish people. Most of this work resides in the public domain. The Open Siddur is your Siddur. Join the Open Siddur Project today and begin crafting and sharing the siddur you’ve always wanted.

Project Overview

Ever wonder what our project looks like as a flowchart? Aharon updated the old one to be more readable — do you get it?

Did you want an Open Siddur web application last year and aren’t sure how you can help bring it into reality? Check out these ways you can help advance this project — even if you’re not a computer programmer!

Fascinated by technology and wondering how our work fits into the future of book publishing? Check out this link if you were wondering what a print-to-digital-to-print technology project such as our web application can offer the world more generally: http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/wikis/xmlProduction/XMLProductionStartWithTheWeb

Project Team Updates

One way of helping to contribute to the project is offering work opportunities for our volunteers, some of whom are unemployed, freelance, and pay for their own health insurance. If you have a job opportunity and need committed workers and creative thinkers, contact us.

We welcome Shmueli Gonzales and Amir Starr Weg to our team of transcribers. Shmuel’s work can already be appreciated here.

Ben Varadi may have graduated Tulane’s Law School (congrats!) but the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law & Culture continues to provide the Open Siddur Project with excellent copyright research thanks to Justin A. Levy and an application that Ben devised, the Durationator. Ben’s also created a rather excellent Book Scanner. Ben’s now working for jgrad, a project of the NOLA Jewish federation providing Jewish resources for graduate students and recent college grads.

New Contributions

We now have a contribution form for folk to share their work directly at opensiddur.org. While progress continues on developing our web application, there’s no reason we can’t begin sharing our work now — just in a more conventional way.

A growing historical map charting Jewish liturgies by Aharon, now in version 2.3 with input from Dr. Richard Sarason (HUC-JIR) and Dr. Kay Shelemay (Harvard).
A d’var tefillah and kavanah on the springtime Prayer for the Dew contributed by Rachel Barenblat.
A kavanah on the meaning of one’s posture in the Amidah by Virginia Spatz.
Two Simḥat Bat ceremonies were contributed, both from teachers at Yeshivat Hadar (Mechon Hadar): one by Rav Elie Kaunfer and Lisa Exler, and one by Dr. Devora Steinmetz and Rabbi David Silber.
Twenty-seven translations of important halakhic source texts providing halakhic guidance on creative innovation with Jewish litury within the history of Rabbinic Jewish discourse. These were provided by Rav Ethan Tucker (Yeshivat Hadar, Mechon Hadar).
A new English translation of Louis Ginzberg’s Prayer for the Government by Rabbi Tim Bernard.
Modular transcriptions of the Nusaḥ Ha-Ari by Shmuel Gonzales. Nine modules so far. These transcriptions will be added to our transcription of Siddur Torah Ohr and proofread.
A transcription of the 1917 JPS English translation of Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs, was just completed by Aharon and proofread by Efraim.
A digital JLPTEI XML formatted edition of James Strong’s venerable Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, prepared with the help from Ze’ev Clementson, David Troidl, and Efraim Feinstein. Also, a digital JLPTEI XML formatted edition of the Singer Siddur, Rabbi Marcus Adler’s authorised siddur translated by Rabbi Simeon Singer. Both of these XML formatted editions are available for download with our source code.
FONTS: Ze’ev helped convince the Culmus Ancient Hebrew Script Project to make their free (GPL) fonts even free-er with the GPL font exception. Google helped convince the maintainer of the Cardo font to share the font with SIL’s Open Font License.

Application Development (step by step until it’s ready)

We tested and then made public our transliteration engine with eight transliteration tables to choose from including International Phonetic Alphabet, Modern Ashkenazi dialect, and Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Efraim documented and tested his encoding engine on the Singer Siddur.

Work on a replacement for our transcription/proofreading interface on our wiki is beginning. All transcribers are invited to provide input on the design and function of this transcription interface. (We want to make it easier for you to help us transcribe text.) Contact us directly or share your ideas on the opensiddur-talk discussion list.

Communications

We’ve made an effort to separate technical discussion into its own area for non-tech participants and followers of the Open Siddur Project.

Most recently we separated the Live Chat conferences we organize on IRC into separate tech and non-tech sessions. Logs are posted here.

Following his session at Limmud NY in January, Aharon Varady gave a public presentation on the Open Siddur Project at the Academy of Jewish Religon’s Spring Intensive in Riverdale, NY last March. (Other guest speakers included authors Lawrence Hoffman and Jill Hammer).

Aharon gave another public presentation on the value of Open Source for Jewish non-profits at the Future of Jewish Nonprofit Summit late last month in New York City. Afterwards, Aharon was interviewed by Radio613′s co-hosts Avi and Malcha, on CFRC Kingston, Ontario 101.9 FM.

Efraim presented the Open Siddur Project at the NewCAJE conference for Jewish educators. Follow-up thoughts are here.

New Documentation

Our Transcription Rules for transcribing and proofreading text were completely revamped.

Efraim wrote up an introduction to Hacking Open Siddur Code.

Many, many additions, disambiguations, and edits were made to existing pages on the wiki and at opensiddur.org .

To follow our development more regularly, follow our opensiddur RSS feed, twitter feed, and facebook group.

Thankful for John B. Hare

The Hierophant — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:43:09 +0000

We just learned that yesterday John Bruno Hare, founder of the Internet Sacred Texts Archive, passed away. John’s last decade of life was deeply invested in breathing life into public domain texts that had never been digitized. All this material was released back into the world as freely licensed content. Just as the many texts John made available inspire wisdom, so may John’s life and work continue to be an inspiration.

The day John died, we announced the completion of our transcription of the Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 English translation of דברי הימים א Chronicles I. After Psalms and Nehemia, this was the third work we had transcribed in partnership with the Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA). We were just one group of collaborators among many others. ISTA already completed the Torah and Nevi’im up till 2 Kings. Due to the standard public domain licensing of our work, all that we endeavoured to complete could easily be shared with other free culture projects, such as Wikisource.

Indeed, we learned of John’s passing from another ISTA volunteer working on the JPS transcription project, Kimberley Peake at the University of Michigan. John’s work not only provided important texts for the whole world, it also connected the Open Siddur Project to other like minded collaborators. As we begin our first pass proofread of 1 & 2 Chronicles we invite the world to support John’s important project making public domain works of human spirituality accessible digitally over the Internet with unrestricted free culture licensing.

Ramona Turner’s article at the Santa Cruz Sentinel last August 11th, 2009, gave us some more information about John’s declining health. John was working on making the archive into a self-sustaining publishing venture when he died.

[...] his goal is to make Evinity Publishing, which he started this year as a parent company for his site and other products, continue to educate curious minds long after he passes on.

“Essentially, this is my gift to the world,” he said. “I don’t want it to go away if I die. People consider it a world treasure.”

Hare has stage-three melanoma, an aggressive cancer with no cure. He said he’s to undergo surgery soon to remove the cancerous part of the tumor from his right shoulder, before irradiating it in an effort to slow its regrowth. Hare doesn’t know how long he has to live, but works tirelessly through his pain to make Evinity profitable.

The two surviving employees of this venture will hopefully be able to continue his work. Please buy a mug, CD-ROM, or simply make a donation to ISTA in John’s memory and help his vision survive.

ברוּך דיין האמת ֨ Blessed be the righteous judge

A Kaddish

Make the God-name big.

Big and holy.

Do it in this world,

This creation sprung from consciousness,

And bring some order to this.

Do it fast, soon, in our lives, in the days ahead, in the life of the
people we call home.

Everybody join with me: May the Name be blessed forever and ever!

Yes, blessed.

Blessed, whispered, sung out, shouted, honored, this holy name.

The Name is beyond any song, poem, or comforting words we could ever speak.

Eveybody say: That’s the truth!

May a big peace descend from the heavens, a life-giving peace for all
of us, for our beloved people,

Let everybody say: May it be true!

Make that peace in the heavens, great peacemaker, great One who brings
wholeness to our people.

Stop.

Everybody pray:

May it be true.

(A Kaddish by R’ Daniel Brenner)

Presenting the Open Siddur Project at the Academy for Jewish Religion

Aharon Varady — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:08:21 +0000

Working on the Open Siddur Project has afforded me the opportunity to meet some amazing people, communities, and institutions. On Rosh Chodesh Nissan, 5770, (March 16th) this year, I was honored to speak before the good folk at the Academy for Jewish Religion (AJR).

AJR is a non-denominational Rabbinical College in Riverdale, New York committed to pluralism. The school has an annual spring intensive, a three day mini-conference focused on a particularly fertile subject of importance to rabbinical and lay leaders. This year the Intensive entitled “PITḤU LI SHA’AREI TZEDEK: Opening the Synagogue Worship Experience” was focused on understanding, preparing, and selecting resources for communal prayer. Rabbi Jeff Hoffman had heard me speak at Limmud NY in January this year and subsequently recommended me to Sandy Kilstein, dean of AJR. I was asked to speak to show what technologies were “on the horizon” as Sandy put it, understanding that our project is at an early stage of development. Also speaking at the intensive were R’ Lawrence Hoffman (The People’s Prayerbook), R’ Jill Hammer, R’ Jeff Hoffman, Dr. Ora Horn Prouser, Hazzan Ari Priven, Dr. Livia Straus, and others. My only regret is that due to my own intensive schedule at Hadar I was only able to take off that one afternoon to present and wasn’t able to learn from the rest of the program.

I arrived on the campus the College of Mt. Saint Vincent a few days after a particularly horrendous late winter storm. Because of electrical problems our presentations were moved from a large ballroom to an old science building’s lecture hall with stepped seating. I brought a Open Siddur Presentation v.0.2 (3mb PDF) to illustrate my narrative with leading questions, but the room wasn’t really easily set up to use a projector while lecturing from the center stage. Making matters a little more difficult, there was no Internet access to illustrate some of the work we’ve accomplished. Thankfully, I also brought an 8.5 x 14 handout to teach the participants how to make a book (even a siddur!) with a single sheet of paper — a neat piece of kirigami taught me by master book binder, Olivia Antsis.

The final speaker on the second day, I spoke for a bit less than an hour, and then there were some questions and we made books together. I spoke extemporaneously on the vision for the Open Siddur and where it comes from: the importance of collaboration and sharing and how free culture licensing make this possible. How our Jewish spiritual projects are only enlivened and deepened by improving access to all Jews to engage creatively in them, and how the Open Siddur creates a bridge between cultural and individual authenticity. I spoke about romanticism and the Arts & Crafts movement and on the revival of making, on arduino, and on feeling profound ownership in a creative process of making meaning.

I think it went over well. There were a few questions afterward. One question I remember asked for clarification on how the Open siddur was different from a wiki. (The answer is the Open Siddur is committed to privacy in creating personal spaces where the user controls the degree to which their work is shared. Collaborative groups are groups of friends sharing access to particular pieces of work.) Someone else, sensing that the orientation of the project was on individual spirituality, wanted to know more about how this resource might be useful for communities and siddur committees. (The answer is that the resource provides a mechanism for maintaining a text for modification over generations regardless of who prepares it, and that through collaboration a siddur committee could do a great deal more work without organizing their effort with scissors, rubber glue, copy sheets and a binder. All material by a collaboration group is stored in a database and accessible from anywhere over the Internet. Consultants can provide advice or guidance as needed.)

But I think the most fun had by everyone was in making books from a single sheet of paper. Actually, not one book but two books. Since the paper was printed with different text on either side, depending on which direction the paper was folded one would see a different book. One side of the page contained some of the blessings from Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Siddur Tehillat Hashem. The other side contained an essay explaining the vision and mission of the Open Siddur Project. If you have some blank 8.5 x 14 pages lying around you can make your own. Just print out The Open Siddur Demo v.0.2 on either side of single sheet of 8.5 x 14 paper. The book demonstrates the potential of sharing and modifying free culture licensed texts for print and use as part of a personal or communal spiritual practice.

Instructions

1. fold sheet down the center, lengthwise
2. open up the sheet of paper and fold the sheet again down the center, widthwise
3. open up the sheet of paper again and fold the width-length ends towards the center fold creating quarter folds
4. fold the center of the sheet together widthwise letting the quarter folds open freely. Should look like a T. Make a cut from the center towards the quarter folds
5. fold the sheet over lengthwise, pulling the center out to form an open square.
6. squeeze together the ends. the cover page should go on top.

Just to retrace my steps a bit… This journey really started with my time spent with the myriad of other folk who prepared for and showed up at Jews in the Woods gatherings. It was at one such retreat at the old Eilat Chayyim in upstate New York that I met Dan Sieradski who had worked on his own Open Source Siddur project and who afterward invited me to the advisory board of what was then called Matzat and which might now be called Jew-It-Yourself. I promised him that the siddur we would develop would be an important feature of the larger constellation of resources we were imagining, resources all complementary due to our use of free and open source licensing.

At that time, back in 2006 I was still in Louisiana working for engineering companies as an urban planner and cartographer after hurricane Katrina and Rita. It wasn’t until I left Louisiana and started earnestly looking for work on the East Coast that I began to spend my free seriously working on the Open Siddur Project again. Pretty soon I met Efraim Feinstein and Azriel Fasten, fellow collaborators on the Open Siddur, and thereafter, J.T. Waldman and the kind folks at PresenTense Institute Summer Workshop, Ariel Beery, Aharon Horwitz, and the other fellows there, Russel Neiss, Charlie Schwartz, and Matt Berkowitz. PresenTense opened me to a world of creatives operating all over the Jewish world: Sarah Kass at AviChai, Elisheva at PerlMonks, Avi Warshavsky at the Center for Educational Technology, and Bob Goldfarb at the Center for Jewish Culture & Creativity. And then this year at Yeshivat Hadar, to have so much access to R’ Elie Kaunfer, R’ Shai Held, Dr. Devorah Steinmetz, R’ Ethan Tucker, Ram Avital Hochenstin, and my fellow peers. All of these intelligent people helped me to think and rethink what it was I was really suggesting with the Open Siddur Project, to understand its value and meaning. I think we are just at the beginning of understanding how this this resource could build bridges between our diverse communities.

Development Status (2010-02-15)

The Hierophant — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:39:30 +0000

Open Siddur Project Development Status as of February 2010/Adar 5770

Friends,

The communal project of Jewish spirituality can only be improved through cooperation and collaboration. The creative work used in our traditional liturgies is the common cultural heritage of the Jewish people. Most of this work resides in the public domain. The Open Siddur is your Siddur. Join the Open Siddur Project today and begin crafting and sharing the siddur you’ve always wanted.

This development status update chronicles progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 11/11/2009. If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list.

Contributions (Aharon, Anonymous, Gabriel, Efraim, Eve, Daniel, John)

Following the contribution of Reb Zalman’s Siddur Tehillat HaShem, R. Daniel Brenner, executive director of Birthright Israel Next, contributed a Kaddish prayer that he composed in English. Check it out here. Feel free to adapt and modify these works for yourself. They are distributed with a Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike By Attribution license. (All derivative works must show attribution to the original authors and must also be distributed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.)

John B. Hare of the Internet Sacred Text Archive contributed the scans and auto-transcribed text of the 1917 JPS English Translation of the TaNaKh. We are currently helping John release the first ever free licensed digital text of the 1917 JPS TaNaKh translation and have proofread the Book of Neḥemia and nearly 70% of Psalms. Please help us complete this task by proofreading a few pages — it’s a relatively easy way to begin working on the Open Siddur Project.

John Hare also scanned and transcribed a 1915 edition of the Singer Siddur, an English translation based on Seligman Baer’s Seder Avodat Yisrael. Thank you, John!

Transcription of Seder Avodat Yisrael has picked up since our last update. We have transcribed 33 pages of the liturgy from Baer’s critical edition. Every line of text transcribed is digitally liberated with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license for free use in future siddurim. If you haven’t yet, register on the wiki and start transcribing today. This is a great way to become fluent typing Hebrew with nikkudot (vowels) — a real skill!

Gabriel Wasserman contributed his transcription of many sections of the Seder Avodat Yisrael that he had incorporated into his Maḥzor for Shabbat Ḥanukkah. Thank you, Gabriel!

Efraim Feinstein acquired and scanned a work of the Siddur Torah Ohr (Nusaḥ HaAri/Lubavitch) an important siddur based on the text edited by R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi. A partial digital transcription of the siddur is already available on Wikisource and this scan will help us complete that transcription and provide a source for proofreading it. Thanks Efraim!

An anonymous contributor provided a text of the Spanish-Portuguese Nusaḥ. The text is currently formatted in the proprietary format of DavkaWriter Platinum. Please let us know if you have a copy of this software and if you can help us convert this document to an open standard Unicode format.

If you have digitized any text of the siddur or prepared a siddur that you’d like to share, please consider contributing your work to the Open Siddur Project.

Software Development (Efraim, Ze’ev, Ilan, Raphael)

We have now a functioning demonstration of how we can display text encoded in JLPTEI XML on a webpage. Click here for examples of working Open Siddur technology.

An update to our demo is forthcoming this week. License statements and contributor credits lists are now being generated by the code, and both are mostly functional. These should be incorporated in demo release 0.3.1 Generating a bibliography correctly is a bit harder, and may have to wait for 0.4. We are in the process of moving our Tanach to get its data directly from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. The process is almost complete, and the new code will likely be in demo release 0.4.

Since our last update, we’ve passed a few milestones, especially in our work on data transforms. The major improvements we’ve made are the following:

JLPTEI’s conditional inclusion feature
Parallel text alignment for translations
Generic standoff annotations, the basis for instructions, commentary, linkages, historical notation

With a lot of help from Ze’ev Clementson, cross platform build procedures and instructions were tested; many build errors and documentation errors were fixed.

Ze’ev has been checking in code to converting the STML formatted text of the Singer Siddur provided by John B. Hare (see above) into a more easily parsed XML representation. He’s now working on encoding this into JLPTEI XML formatted text for integration into the Open Siddur’s database. Ze’ev has also committed code for converting Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary into JLPTEI XML for integration into the Open Siddur. (It’s currently formatted in OSIS.) Ze’ev is currently working on the conversion of David Troidl’s digitization of the Strong’s Biblical Hebrew dictionary from OSIS to JLPTEI for integration into the Open Siddur.

Ilan Cohen committed an outline of the jQuery port of the transcription interface. Thanks Ilan!

Some of the work we’re doing requires expertise in the rules of Hebrew grammar and its effect on vowel markings. Jonah Rank provided Joshua Jacobson’s rules written in Chanting the Hebrew Bible for determining qamats qatan. Raphael Finkel completed the first-pass qamats qatan/sheva na detection code. That code (currently written in Perl) needs to be integrated into our infrastructure (mostly XQuery/XSLT; might be able to work in Java). The transliteration engine used in Efraim’s early proof-of-concept Haggadah is now incorporated into the code again. It will need some tweaking again once we integrate a system for indicating a definite sheva na in the encoding, and it does not work properly unless the qamats qatan is properly encoded).

Documentation (Efraim, Aharon, Ze’ev)

We are still looking for volunteers to just look over our documentation and help us know how it reads and where we can make improvements. Anyone can freely register to edit on our wiki.

Much thanks are due to Ze’ev Clementson whose many questions posed on our discussion list helped us clarify our documentation and fix bugs in our build processes.

Aharon and Efraim, besides blogging on opensiddur.net, they are also contributing to the new J-Tech list set up by Dan Sieradski. If you’re a Jewish technologist, we recommend this list as a useful space for sharing knowledge and ideas.

Organizational Structure (Aharon, Efraim)

After some feedback, we’ve made an effort to merge all project resources under the Open Siddur Project banner. If you look closely, you’ll still see the Jewish Liturgy Project. Hint: take a look at our XML encoding documentation :)

Efraim and Aharon are looking into economic models to keep this project both free and sustainable in the long term. One of these models is a cooperative of contributors. We are certainly looking for more input here.

We are now capable of receiving tax deductible donations via Razoo through a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the United States 501(c)3 registered non-profit, Center for Jewish Culture & Creativity. Money raised this way can help us pay for our major operational expenses (server costs, domain registration fees).

Communications and Promotion (Aharon)

Aharon gave a presentation at this year’s Limmud NY and pitched the Open Siddur Project. Answering his question, what’s the siddur you’ve always wanted, 11 year old Leora answered: “I’ve grown a lot since I was given my first siddur in second grade, but I’m still using the same blue Shiloh siddur. I’d like to make a siddur that I can draw in, write my own prayers, and share them with my friends.” Help the Open Siddur Project bring Leora’s vision to fruition, there are many ways to contribute.

We now have two discussion email lists and an announcement email list. Much of the volume on our old jewishliturgy-discuss list was focused on software development. To avoid having our non-developer list members tune out of the discussion, we thought it better to divide the list into opensiddur-talk and opensiddur-tech.

The opensiddur-announcement list will be used mainly for sending out regular updates like this one. Announcements will also be shared via twitter (149 followers) and our facebook group (nearly 300 users).

Since last November we have had 3 Open Siddur Open Chats at irc://irc.freenode.net/jewisliturgy . During these chats we’ve talked shop with all sorts of curious folks, software developers, liturgy researchers, and Jewish educators. The format and medium of the communication (Internet Relay Chat) is proving difficult for a number of participants and we’re investigating alternatives. So far we’ve looked at DimDim and came away unimpressed. Any suggestions for cross-platform group chat technology accessible to users at no cost?

Thanks to quick action on the part of Azriel, the Open Siddur Project now owns the opensiddur.org domain. Good work, Azriel! :)

The logs of the chat are available on our wiki, here.

Our next Open Chat is scheduled for February 21st, 1pm EST/10am PST/8pm Israel.

Aharon will be speaking on the Open Siddur at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, March 15th.

Press (Aharon, Efraim)

Since our last update in November, two major articles appeared in Jewish media concerning the Open Siddur Project. Hadara Graubart’s “Prayer Unbound“, in Tablet Magazine and Steve Lipman’s “Taking Prayer Into Their Own Hands“, in Jewish Week. Sociologist Dr. Steven M. Cohen may have also been thinking of us when he wrote concerning the use of New media by young Jewish innovators in an article for the JPR Newsletter, “From Jewish people to Jewish purpose: The new age of social innovation in American Jewish life, and its implications for British Jewry“:

“The growth of Jewish culture may partly be attributed to the expansion of the Internet and the decline in production costs. The Internet has allowed new music, videos and films to be produced and distributed at almost no cost. Much of the recent Jewish innovation focuses on building websites, which typically empower Jews to create their own Jewish lives on their own terms. As the Internet has become a two-way communications device, online innovations often allow users to participate in interesting Jewish activities that are free of any controlling authority. Examples include online facilities that allow people to create their own siddurim (prayer books) or access midrashim (Biblical commentaries) in ways that enable Jews to discover traditional texts.”

Team Member Updates (Azriel, Aharon)

Azriel writes that this semester has kept him super busy and so hasn’t been able to give as much as he’d like to the Open Siddur this semester. Everyone here misses him.

Most of our developers are either working full time or studying full time. Aharon’s fellowship at Yeshivat Hadar is coming to a close in May and he’s been busy thinking about where he can go next to help improve awareness, increase compassion, and inspire creativity through Jewish spiritual techniques and technologies. If you’re looking for someone multi-talented, capable, and visionary all at once, reach out to him while he’s still available. Your Jewish institution could hardly do better and you’d be supporting the Open Siddur Project at the same time.

Wishing you a happy and warm Adar,
Aharon Varady
Founder & Co-director
The Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.net/join-us/

First Pitch from the Hotseat

Aharon Varady — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:47:15 +0000

Busy days this week at the PresenTense (PT) hub for the Open Siddur project. Wednesday was the heaviest and began in earnest with work on a website, opensiddur.org, from late Tuesday night into the lonely hours before the sunrise.

Each Wednesday, PT encourages its fellows by requiring the submission of a deliverable. The first was the “Visioning Deliverable”–a short narrative of Open Siddur’s quest to improve an imperfect world, how we will attract minions to our cause, and what we need in order to accomplish our goal. For this deliverable, I submitted the About page of opensiddur.org.

Later in the morning, and after a few hours rest, I explained the Open Siddur project to a journalist from a major Israeli English language newspaper/website (!) A challenging interview, I’m hopeful the story is accepted for publication in the next few weeks.

One of the ideas I elaborated in the interview that I had not developed beforehand was the idea that the project of the Open Siddur is important for both beginner and advanced Siddur users because it enables a more dynamic and content-rich mental Siddur. Regular Siddur users have so many prayers memorized, that practically they could recite t’fillah (prayer) verbatim without printed text. A siddur with variations between nusḥot made visible and accessible would both enrich the experience of t’fillah as well as improve one’s understanding and respect of Jewish diversity — an important value in the Jewish tradition of minhagim (regional customs) and nusaḥot (regional variations in liturgy).

The idea of a mental Siddur should sound similar to anyone who has read the interesting theories concerning mental maps and developed further by critical cartographers such as Matthew Edney. Physical maps are artifacts reflecting cultural worldviews, and I think similarly, the seder (order), liturgy, and rules concerning group and individual prayer reflect particular Jewish values. The fact that Judaism so respects the diversity of minhagim and nusaḥot reflects a value of pluralism engaged in one of the most intimate experiences of Jewish spirituality.

Post-interview I was keen to share what I said with my partners at our sister project at jewishliturgy.org. Volume on our listserve is spiking and I noticed jewschool writer David A.M. Wilensky is now participating on it too. I’m enthusiastic that we’re working on a new proof of concept highlighting our vision for the Open Siddur which will apply Efraim Feinstein’s important work developing a Jewish liturgy extension to the Text Enconding Initiative XML schema for encoding text.

After a brisk afternoon walk to find a SIM card at the local Hadar mall (new cell number, 052 789 2435), I returned to the PresenTense hub in time to give the first pitch from the “Hotseat” (the name Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz have for their version of pitchgiving methodology). It boils down to 3 minutes of pitching, 5 minutes of questions, 5 minutes of comments, and 2 minutes of wrap-up. Many people use slide application such as MS PowerPoint for this. There was simply no time for a slide presentation at short notice, even while multitasking, and I welcomed fellow PT fellow Russel Neiss’ encouragement to take confidence in myself as the unbound expression of the Open Siddur inside me.

The pitch actually went pretty well, all things considered. Given Ariel’s formula I quickly outlined my remarks and delivered them with passion. PT encourages social entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas in the form of a narrative describing the imperfect present, the improved future, and what’s needed to get there.

I began by explaining that in the experience of religion there is a contradiction between the individual’s desire for authentic experience and their need for relevant tools to engage individual growth vis-à-vis the project of Judaism. This contradiction is actually a design challenge for useful tools in Judaism’s toolkit of educational and spiritual resources for its participants. The imperfect present is expressed in many current expressions of the Siddur. Although a siddur’s nusaḥ is an authentic expression of a tradition, its utility as a static tool for engaging the creative improvisation required for sinciere spiritual expression (as well as its ability to serve as the traditional tool for educating Jews in sourcetext) is certainly questionable.

Our solution is a siddur that is a Siddur that users can build for themselves. Ingredients from all available siddur texts (i.e., copyright permitting) will be available for building siddurim ranging from unchanged nusaḥ Ashkenaz, to mashups of different nusaḥot with additional prayers and art added by the user, with user edited translations they contribute to, and with commentary they share with other users. In this way, a siddur user becomes a sophisticated master of t’fillah, seriously engaged in the prayer authored and offered by Jewish tradition with the freedom to enrich the tradition from their own experience privately or publicly.

During the comment period of my Hotseat pitch, a PT fellow made an important comment. The problem I described wasn’t necessarily solved by the solution provided. For example: there might be a deeper problem to the concept of a spiritual tool with a formal liturgy being capable of successfully engaging the spiritual and creative expression of its users — even with the freedom provided by remixing content. Understanding this, we nevertheless see the siddur also relevant to the value of communal spiritual engagement–and this is why formal text exists–so that participants can share in a common structure for engagement.

[cross-posted to PresenTense]