User:Aharonium
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Hello English Wikisource users,
My name is Aharon Varady. I am an urban planner, environmental educator, and the founder and director of the Open Siddur Project, an open source collaborative publishing project intent on digitizing the diverse corpus of Jewish liturgical and spiritual writings in every language they were composed in or translated into, including, of course, English. This project is also helping to transcribe works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Polish, Italian, Ladino, Farsi, and Arabic. Our project is non-denominational and non-prescriptive and we invite contributors who understand and appreciate the importance of free-culture licensing as a foundation for a more vital and creative culture. I want to help develop bridges between Judaic scholarship, Jewish practice, and craft, and this project seems to me to be the intersection of all of areas of interesting work.
My first project here on Wikisource is over at the German Wikisource site. It's a proofread of my transcription of Fanny Neuda's Stunden der Andacht, a collection of tkhines (or תחינות in Hebrew, petitionary prayers) written in German and first published in 1855. I used tesseract-OCR to help transcribe the gothic Fraktur font in Stunden Der Andacht. A translation of a portion of this work was made in English by Mortiz Mayer in 1866 which I have also transcribed. My goal is to provide the first free-culture licensed, digital edition of Stunden Der Andacht in the original German with its English translation.
Besides this, I'd like to proofread a transcription of Rabbi Simeon Singer's English translation of the Siddur (Nusach Ashkenaz, Minhag Polin).
After proofreading, I want this text to be encoded according to the TEI XML encoding schema popular in the digital humanities. It would really be wonderful if wikisource provided an interface for directly tagging and outputting text in a standard format like TEI.
I look forward to learning more German and collaborating with the good folk here at German Wikisource.