Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Nurani: A Walk Through of Meedan's Inter-faith Scriptural Study Site

We are proud to announce the first release of Nurani, a platform for cross-language scriptural discussion for Muslim and Christian scholars managed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, a programme of the Faculty of Divinity. Nurani is a cross-language open source platform for inter-religious dialogue developed by Meedan. The goal is to facilitate improved understanding between different faith communities and between speakers of Arabic and English. Nurani achieves this by enabling users to share and discuss scriptural and commentary texts from their faith traditions in two... Read The Rest →

Nurani: How Meedan aims to promote deeper understanding between faiths

Nurani.org is a platform for dialogue between religious scholars, leaders and civic groups in two languages – Arabic and English. The product of a collaboration between Meedan, the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge,  the Coexist Foundation, and a consortium of universities and research centres, it allows members of the Abrahamic faith traditions to share and study their scriptures together. Nurani itself is designed for bi-lateral discussions between Muslims and Christians, though the underlying platform is being customized for three-faith dialogue involving Jewish participants. Nurani.org specifically aims to: enable... Read The Rest →

UK Research Grant supports Meedan web service to improve communication between religions

Meedan’s Nurani platform – a digital project to develop online dialogues between Muslims, Christians and Jews –  has won a prestigious UK Research Councils’ grant worth $450,000. Developed with our partners at the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme and the Coexist Foundation, Nurani is a pioneering web service that enables cross-language discussions between religious leaders, scholars and civic groups in Arabic and English. The research grant, which is part of the highly competitive Digital Economy Programme, will support the creation of the world’s first inter-faith library of religious texts and the further... Read The Rest →

Lessons of Scriptural Reasoning for cross-cultural dialogue

Earlier this year, I was invited to sit in on a theological gathering at Cambridge University.  With few expectations about what I was to experience, I turned up on the first morning armed with a pen and paper, and a cup of fresh coffee. Over three intense days, I watched scholars from as far afield as Asia, North America, the Middle East and Russia pour over passages of scripture in small mixed faith groups.  Although the academic surroundings were familiar to me, I was to be exposed to a form... Read The Rest →

Meedan partners with Cambridge Inter-faith Programme on platform for religious dialogue

In a landmark and multi-year project, Meedan is working with the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme (CIP) at the University of Cambridge to engage cross-language inter-faith dialogue and scholarship on the web. With support from the Coexist Foundation, we aim to bring Muslim and Christian leaders into respectful discussions around scripture that will be durable for the long term and accessible to a wide public. The project aims to bridge an existing language divide between scholars and faith leaders in the Middle East and the West, by providing high quality human translation... Read The Rest →

Crafting a moderation policy for cross-cultural dialogue online

What are the ingredients needed to craft an appropriate moderation policy for a cross-cultural forum? That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for some time.   In many ways, it’s a question we’ll need to be asking as long as this project exists. Meedan obviously brings together people of very different linguistic, cultural and religious backgrounds – which makes moderation challenging in two distinct respects. One, there are not obvious cultural norms we can draw on. And two, we are necessarily bringing together divergent viewpoints which are more likely... Read The Rest →

How you can help spark east-west dialogue with a delicious tag

If you’ve ever tagged a bookmark on delicious, you can help us. What? Yes, we want you to help us track, aggregate and translate the stories and sources you care about, using a popular bookmarking service on the web. All it takes is a simple tag: for_meedan. How? Imagine you’ve just read a brilliant article about Gaza that you feel needs to be seen more widely. You might share it with your close friends on facebook, or send it to a mailing list. But you can also pretty easily share... Read The Rest →

Meedan to build religious dialogue platform with Cambridge Inter-faith Programme

Meedan has partnered with the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme to develop an online platform for inter-faith discussion. We aim to produce a world-class, high-impact, web-based platform to aid discussion and promote understanding between leading figures in the Abrahamic Faiths. We envision a universally accessible resource for government, the press, educational institutions and the general public. We aim to build a ‘first port of call’ for inter-faith comment, analysis and discussion. The platform has two elements, each of which addresses a significant challenge to media designed for the web: (1) It will... Read The Rest →

What the Arab World Thinks about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

As you will likely already know, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace prize. So we have our mission statement for the day: “To provide diverse translated views on Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace prize win from across the Middle East and beyond.” So here’s are the latest links from our thread: If you think you can help us, here’s how you can get involved: 1- Visit Meedan and add your view, post a url to an important blog or op-ed response, or help us translate comments and articles coming in... Read The Rest →

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