10 Year-Old Proposal to Archive and Edit Rabbinic List Serves
Photoshopped Talmud by Shai Gluskin
Inspired by reading a recent interview in HEEB with Douglas Rushkoff "New Commands, Old Programs", I wanted to share ran old proposal I dug up that I thought of while reading the Rushkoff article.
It's a proposal I had made to a nascent (and never fully flowered) body that was promoting collaboration among rabbinical organizations across denominational lines. There was a bit of interest, as I remember, but the proposal never went anywhere.
To this day, the rabbis groups each have their own list serve, none with a usable or much used archive. There is great potential for the hand of a contemporary database-enabled Talmudic editor to take the hidden knowledge and and allow it to become shared wisdom.
I wrote the proposal in October of 2000 and then edited it and submitted it, via the RRA, in February of 2001. Here it is:
Turning Rabbinic E-mail Mailing Lists into Valuable Resources:
A Proposal for A Contemporary Talmud Project
February 12, 2001
Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative rabbis have been participating in separate e-mail mailing lists for three to five years. The rabbis in each of the groups have:
- Provided practical and emotional help at the request of colleagues
- Shared and debated ideas on the full spectrum of their work in particular and Jewish life in general
- Discussed classic and contemporary Jewish resources
These conversations are not currently archived in any useful way and are therefore not available to rabbis who may be seeking similar wisdom currently. Rabbis are constantly re-inventing the wheel when help is just an e-mail message away. If only it could be found!
The Talmudic Nature of E-mail Mailing Lists
Internet technology closely mirrors the method of the Talmud in its emphasis on dialog and banter. A unique opportunity exists now to harvest the wisdom of contemporary rabbis and to do it in a modality that resonates deeply with longstanding Jewish methodology.
What Needs to Be Done
- Messages from the mailing lists need to be logged into databases.
- Messages need to be cleaned up; there are all kinds of formatting problems.
- Appropriate subject titles must be designated. The key to sorting the material by topic will be the assigning of appropriate message titles to the individual posts. Key words and categories will be linked to each post.
- Formats need to be developed for best presentation and search capabilities for effective retrieval by rabbis using the world-wide-web interface.
- The rabbinical organizations need help in setting up the infrastructures to process messages in an on-going way for easy later retrieval so that such a large project will not have to be undertaken in the future.
Note that "1" and "2" can be highly automated. "3" will require much "hand" labor.
Collaborative Nature of the Project
The RRA, CCAR, and RA would take on the project collaboratively. Each group would retain proprietary control of their material. However, the technical methodologies would be immediately shared; the project managers for each group would work together. And finally, each group would designate certain threads of conversation, with the permission of the authors, to be made available to the other rabbinic bodies.
Comments
5 comments postedA tremendous idea with potentially great rewards for all non-Orthodox Jews (and perhaps even Orthodox ones) to have insight into the process of contemporary Talmudic rulings. Two challenges are likely to be obtaining the permission of the participating rabbis, who may have previously thought they were submitting "off-the-record" style deliberations/thoughts to an audience of peers. Also, some editing will be needed, but the balance will need to be struck between editing for grammar, style, etc and the kind of editing that is editorializing and shaping the arguments. I'm of two minds on the presence of tangents on a given discussion, because as I recall, tangents often emerged in classical rabbinic literature...
I would love to have access to these conversations...let me know if this discussion is reopened at any point!
Esther, I'm glad to hear of your excitement about the idea.
But I should temper your enthusiasm by saying I don't think the contents of the rabbinic list serves will be available for public consumption for a long time... if ever. Notice the fine print in the collaboration section above.
The proposed sharing was only for certain safe threads, only distributed with the authors' approval, and then only shared on the private listserves of other rabbinical associations. The proposal was far from "open source."
Practically, it could only be done by getting a bunch of rabbis to participate at a rabbis web site that was designated as open source from the beginning. Whether there would be enough rabbis who would participate to make the content valuable is an open question.
Dear Shai:
Given the technological progress in the past decade, how would your proposal be changed?
The short answer is, "not much." I believe all the major rabbinical groups still use list-serves as their primary method of peer-to-peer banter. But I'd have to research that a bit more.
I'll cover the technology below. But first, "Would the proposal have been different in how it proposed to share the edited content? Would the openness emanating out of a Web 2.0/Facebook culture have influenced the rabbis enough to convince them that they might want to share some of their wisdom beyond the rabbinic community?"
My answer is, absolutely not! I see very slow movement on that front. There is a little, but not enough that would have affected the proposal were I to submit it today.
Technology changes. It would be less expensive to migrate the data to databases and clean up the messages. Categorizing and applying appropriate titles for threads would still have to be done "by hand."
Once that work had been done, the display and user interactivity for the data would be better and less expensive than ten years ago.
It also would be much easier at a reasonable cost to apply a system of fine-grained permissions so that all the right people would get access only to messages they were supposed to see.
A new version of the proposal would advocate for replacing the list-serves with web forums that allow for receiving and posting by email. That would get you the best of list serve technology (you can do everything from email), and the best of web technology (content is displayed well and the user can search and interact with the content in compelling ways). The web would also allow for posting audio and video.
I love this idea, Shai. I would love to see it come to pass.