1. Pop-up Parasha
I love the Sunlight Foundation, the D.C.-based philanthropic foundation which provides support to hackers working on software projects that increase transparency and accountability in government. My ultimate wish is to see the creation of something similar for the Jewish community — a laboratory that develops solutions that increase, if not the transparency of our communal institutions, the transparency and accessibility of our tradition itself. And I’ll speak a bit more to that in 30 days, in my summation.
As for now, the reason I bring up the Sunlight Foundation is because a number of years ago, they developed a Javascript widget (sadly, now defunct) called Pop-Up Politicians that is the inspiration for my first idea.
With Pop-up Politicians, a blogger, a newspaper or any other Web publisher, could insert a bit of Javascript into the header of their web documents that would then scan said documents for the names of any congressmen or senators and create hyperlinks that, when clicked, would open a pop-up window that contained links to the representative’s voting record, campaign finance record and Congresspedia (now called OpenCongress) profile.
I loved that little app. I used it on a few of my projects — most notably, JTA’s 2008 election blog. And as I contemplated it, it occurred to me that a similar widget, one that illuminated references to p’sukim and parshiyot (Torah verses and chapters), could have tremendous impact on the way we interact with Jewish texts online.
As Jonathan Rosen wrote in The Talmud and the Internet:
The Hebrew word for tractate is masechet, which means, literally, “webbing.” As with the World Wide Web, only the metaphor of the loom, ancient and inclusive, captures the reach and randomness, the infinite interconnectedness of words.
I have often thought, contemplating a page of Talmud, that it bears a certain uncanny resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations.
I’ve always concurred wholeheartedly with that assessment, and have sought ways to make that connection more visceral than tenuous. And so I thought, why not make a Javascript widget (or, alternately, a Firefox plugin) that will scan web documents for references to p’skuim and parshiyot in Hebrew and English?
Type parshat or parshas Balak, פרשת בלק, Bamidbar, Numbers or Num. 22:2-25:9, במדבר פרק כ′′ב–כ′′ה, etc., and a hyperlink will appear that, when clicked, will open a pop-up that will display a given chapter or verse and its translation, an audio link to hear it read aloud, a link to a Web search for commentaries on that verse (confined to Jewish community sources and featuring links to commentaries on sites using the widget), and a chat board for site-based and Web-wide discussions of that portion of text.
What might that look like?
This handy little app would be made available freely to all interested parties and, due to its novelty and utility, would likely spread quickly throughout the Jewish Web. Anyone writing online about the Tankah (which is, in fact, a considerable market) can just slip a little bit of code into their Web site template and join the fray. Eventually, it could incorporate the Talmud and further responsa. Such a “viral” application has extraordinary potential to bring fluidity to our interactions with Jewish texts, to encourage self-directed learning, to promote pluralism and dialogue (yes, you can flag others’ comments for moderation), and to exhibit the vitality of Judaism as a living tradition.
By working Jewish texts into the flow of our online reading, Pop-up Parasha can help make references that seem “insidery” or out-of-reach for Jewish novices more accessible and thus make autodidactic learning more comfortable. In an era where formal Jewish education is prohibitively expensive, Web-based tools like these are needed more and more to fill the gap.
Tomorrow another, similar tool and a bit further extrapolation on the potential future applications for this widget technology as an educational panacea.
