The Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) research center has been notified that the application "Archive 2.0: Imagining The Michigan State University Israelite Samaritan Scroll Collection as the Foundation for a Thriving Social Network" will receive been funded under the NEH's Digital Start-Up Grant program for AY 2008-09. The project features the work of Rhetoric & Writing Ph.D. candidate and WIDE research assistant Jim Ridolfo, WIDE interaction designer Mike McLeod, and will be directed by Bill Hart-Davidson, WIDE Co-Director and Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures.

The primary goal of the project is to create a working model of a culturally-sensitive repository of the Michigan State Israelite Samaritan collection of texts to support a variety of learning activities including online teaching, learning, and research for members of the Samaritan community as well as biblical and textual scholars; the repository will provide access to digital versions of the scrolls enhanced with Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking (ability to form groups and define relationships among users), tagging, and shared annotations. The collection of sacred Israelite Samaritan texts is one of the most extensive public collections outside the Near East, and has been in the little known possession of MSU since 1950.

According to MSU Religious Studies Professor Robert Anderson who will serve as a consultant for the project, a local businessman from mid-Michigan originally purchased the collection while traveling through Palestine in the first decade of the 20th century. Director of MSU Archives and Historical Collections Cynthia Ghering and MSU Libraries Head of Special Collections Peter Berg will collaborate with WIDE on the project, which will digitize and develop metadata standards for a small portion of the Samaritan collection. The project is being supported by Benyamim Tsedaka, Head of the A.B. Samaritan Institute, and includes the local assistance of Sharon Sullivan Dufour, the institute's North American representative based out of Brighton, MI.

The development of the archive will take place in the Fall and Spring semesters in conjunction with the Israelite Samaritan community following a user-centered development model. Part of the $33,000 project award will be use to support Samaritan Institute representatives who will travel to Michigan for a design workshop in the Fall, In the Spring members of the WIDE team, including Sharon Dufour, will travel to Israel in the Spring in order to present and further test the prototype design.

SWAP is a new digital product developed in 2007 by the WIDE Research Center at Michigan State University. SWAP stands for Social Writing Application Platform. SWAP is a set of modular web services, based on social networking principles, that can be combined in various configurations to assist a wide variety of users, including teachers and students. A working version of SWAP is currently available at http://tne.wide.msu.edu.

SWAP's core functions include:

• a fully relational object database that stores user-contributed content
• a user profile system that enables social networking
• a folksonomic (tagging) system that facilitates user-generated organizational categories and metadata
• faceted browsing and recommender functions that allow users' activities, interests, ratings etc. to influence what they see
• file management functions (upload, sort, full-text search)
• content management functions (collaborative authoring/wiki, versioning,
• role-based permissions and workflows
• mapping (via Googlemaps API)
• feeds (RSS)
• mail and messaging (e.g. SMS)
• custom document markup
  

Each of the functional aspects of SWAP has been built to be as portable as possible, but also to be compatible with other aspects so that these can be combined in various ways as needed to help groups who need to write together. The result: small social writing applications that help to fill gaps in an existing toolset, augment a pre-existing tool or site, etc.

SWAP components currently power several different sites/services, including the LRE, Grassroots (a community mapping service), and the WIDE Content Management System (e.g., www.wide.msu.edu; rhetoric.msu.edu).

Former WIDE Research Assistant Kendall Leon will be presenting WIDE related work at two conferences in October.
Kendall will be presenting work at “Cyberfem Civics: Reimagining Alternative Cyberscapes” with fellow MSU Rhetoric and Writing PhD students Angela Haas, Stacey Pigg, & Robyn Tasaka at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Little Rock, AK. She will also be presenting “Bringing New Community Engagement Research Into Rhetoric and Composition Studies” along with fellow MSU Rhetoric and Writing PhD student Jeffrey Steichman will be presenting at the 7th International Research Conference on Service-Learning and Community Engagement in Tampa, Fl.