8. Jewish Book Builder
Yesterday, I showed you the Open Source Beit Midrash, an application that would take advantage of the XML Jewish texts repository I proposed earlier in the week.
Today I’m going to show you another project that would benefit from said repository: the Jewish Book Builder.
There are a lot of reasons people want to make their own Jewish prayerbooks. Whether it’s their family haggadah, their personalized wedding bentshers, or a more personally-relevant and meaningful siddur — people have their reasons. And there are lot more folks out there who have the desire to create their own prayerbooks than you might think. My own mother, who’s not that picky about the liturgy itself, undertook the process of painstakingly compiling our own family’s haggadah because she wanted to incorporate the tale of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (during which her uncle was martyred) into the Passover story. There are therefore probably hundreds if not thousands of personalized prayerbooks floating around the world that were created by photocopying pages from various volumes and stapling ‘em together.
Originally created as a proof-of-concept for the ideas expressed about Open Source Judaism in Douglas Rushkoff’s controversial book Nothing Sacred, in 2003 I launched the Open Source Haggadah (OSH), an application that lets individuals compile their own haggadot (Passover liturgy) online which they can then download and print for use at their family’s Passover seder.
The way the site works, users are offered the original Hebrew haggadah liturgy, transliterated versions of the text, a variety of English translations and commentaries from different streams of Judaism (from Orthodox to Humanist), an array of songs in English and Hebrew, and a collection of illustrations of slaves, seder plates and the like. Perusing the content, users could click a button that said “add to my haggadah” that would add any given material to their own customized book, which they could then reorder and sort to their liking, and then download as a PDF. In addition users could also upload their own content, either for personal use within their haggadah, or to share with the wider community. This is why it was called “open source.”
OSH was certainly a hit. It had thousands of users and was prominently featured in USA Today and elsewhere throughout the Jewish and secular press. However, there were many limitations on what could be accomplished with the technology as it stood in 2003. And while far more is possible today (seven years is a lifetime in Web years) the project has laid stagnant due to a lack of funding interest.
That said, OSH is about to make a comeback at Haggodot.com, a new take on the project from a graphic designer in Los Angeles named Eileen Levinson. Eileen has taken the concept behind OSH and is reinvigorating it with a new design and improved technology that will have it running better than ever.
The potential success of Haggodot.com is in no small part due to the fact that she’ll be partnering with the Open Siddur Project, Aharon Varady and Efraim Feinstein’s online platform for creating Jewish prayerbooks. Aharon and Efraim have probably worked out the most advanced method to date for dynamically rendering Hebrew prayerbooks along with international translation and transliteration, that can be output as HTML and PDF files.
But Aharon and Efraim’s is a work in progress (Aharon conceived of it around the same time I came up with OSH, but they only started coding it about a year ago) that, other than through Eileen’s haggadah implementation, won’t see a consumer-driven front-end for some years to come. This is largely due to the fact that Aharon and his team are stuck devoting their time to manually encoding the text of our liturgy as XML rather than focusing their energy on front-end development.
In the interim, Aharon and Efraim do have the text of the haggadah fully encoded, and are making it and their rendering engine available to Eileen for her use on Haggodot.org. But could you imagine the possibilities were this XML data already available?
I can. I foresee a future in which creating customized siddurim, bentshers, haggadot, chumashim and all manner of liturgical and scriptural books is as commonplace as making a mixtape (or an MP3 playlist, as it were).
How easy could it be to create your own prayerbooks? Remember the mockups from the Open Source Beit Midrash I showed you yesterday? There was a button under the page tools labeled “Add to Folder.”
Create a folder, add some pages (with or without translation and transliteration, arranged however you like), drag and drop the folder contents to sort, and click one button to render a PDF (for which Acrobat already has various layout and printing format options). It could be that easy, which in turn could impact the way we view ownership over our texts and our mesorah (tradition) radically.
This concludes the first full-week of 31 Days, 31 Ideas. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading thus far. We’ll continue tomorrow evening. As for now, shabbat shalom.
