Paper & Pixel: International Summer School on Digital Humanities in Indology (original) (raw)
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It Takes a Village: Co-developing VedaWeb, a Digital Research Platform for Old Indo-Aryan Texts
2019
Börge Kiss (Institute for Digital Humanities)1, ✉ Daniel Kölligan (Dept. of Linguistics – Historical-Comparative Linguistics)1[0000-0002-3134-8398], Francisco Mondaca (Cologne Center for eHumanities)1, Claes Neuefeind (Institute for Digital Humanities, Data Center for the Humanities)1, Uta Reinöhl (Dept. of Linguistics – General Linguistics)1, 2[0000-0003-2829-682X] and Patrick Sahle (Cologne Center for eHumanities)1[0000-0002-8648-2033]
The Interplays of Language, Society and Culture, 2020
It is known to all that India does possess a large number of classical texts in various classical and non-classical languages and most of these resources are not available to people due to many theoretical and practical constraints. Most of the classical texts of advanced languages are available in digital form to all for academic, non-academic, and commercial purposes based on which these texts have not only generated opportunities for occupation, application, and income but also have made lasting impact on knowledge and cognition of the texts users. By adopting the modern techniques of corpus text processing and language technology we have designed a useful process for classical texts digitization which is reported in this paper. With direct reference to the Gita Govinda of Jayadev, we have shown how a classical text can be digitized, annotated, processed, and utilized for academic and commercial purposes.
Engaging with an Indian Epic: A Digital Approach
International Journal of Computer Applications
India's heritage texts have had a long history of being mined for knowledge of language and culture by Christian missionaries to India, colonial officers of the East Indian Company and the British Raj, German, European and American Indologists and later by native scholars driven by nationalist sentiments. It was during their investigative exercises that a vast body of India's heritage texts was recovered and made the subject of rigorous study. A large number of editions in English translation as well as in modern Indian vernacular languages started appearing on the scene. The focus then was primarily on patthoddhar [retrieval of the 'ur'-text] or making shuddhasanskarana [correct edition]. The exercise was purely manual and time-consuming and concentrated on a limited number of texts. But there still lies a vast treasure of ancient knowledge in India's palm leaf manuscripts, waiting to be discovered, deciphered and interpreted for contemporary readers and scholars. It is impossible to ignore the ubiquitousness of Information Technology based tools and the scope that they offer for large-scale data mining. Of late, a large body of historical texts is being made available digitally by repositories and institutions worldwide. The time is ripe for digitally inspired editions, beginning with studies in corpus linguistics. This paper throws light on the challenges to be addressed for the preparation of a digital historical corpus edition of Sarala Mahabharata, a local version of the famous Sanskrit Mahabharata by Vyasa, from Odisha in the eastern part of India.
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Pre-publication, pre-edited draft. © Dominik Wujastyk, 2011. Now published in: Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds.), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 159-181. ISBN 9783110225624.
The Growing Pains of an Indic Epigraphic Corpus
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Digitizing the University of Pennsylvania's Indic Manuscripts
Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 2018
The University of Pennsylvania possesses the largest collection of Sanskrit and vernacular Indian languages in the Western hemisphere. In 2014, UPenn was awarded a three-year Preservation and Access Grant (PW-51547-15) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), entitled “Providing Global Access to Penn’s Indic Manuscripts.” The project was completed in 2017, within the scheduled three-year period for the award. The original terms of the grant stipulated that staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now absorbed by the Kislak Center) at Penn Libraries was to catalog, rehouse and digitize its Indic manuscript collection, building on efforts from previous years. The collection highlights Penn’s historical commitment to traditional Sanskrit studies and also includes a broad range of vernacular sources including Pali, Prakrit, Hindi, Awadhi, Bengali Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, Persian, Tamil, and Telugu. In this article I outline some of the recent history leading up to the NEH project, including my own involvement as project cataloger and collection consultant. I will then give an overview of the project and highlight some of its scope, content, and significance. Finally, I will consider some possibilities for promoting the collection in the future.
For an Indian Philology of Margins: The Case of Kashmirian Sanskrit Manuscripts
The margins of Indian manuscripts have attracted very little scholarly attention to date. The present paper is aimed at showing, through the example of Kashmirian Sanskrit manuscripts, that Classical Indology has much to gain by studying marginal annotations, first and foremost because the latter often include substantial quotations of texts that are no longer extant, so that they constitute a unique source enabling us to retrieve significant parts of lost works. These marginalia also provide us with an opportunity to understand how certain texts came to be marginalized in the course of time despite their innovative character and the intense exegetic or critical reaction that they might have initially triggered; and they may afford us some rare glimpses into the practical aspects of intellectual life – particularly learning and teaching habits – in medieval India. Published in Silvia D’Intino and Sheldon Pollock (eds.), L’espace du sens: Approches de la philologie indienne. The Space of Meaning: Approaches to Indian Philology, with the collaboration of Michaël Meyer, Paris: De Boccard, Publications de l’Institut de Civilisation Indienne du Collège de France 84, 2018, pp. 305-354.
An electronic thesaurus of Vedic texts
When the first attempts to digitize Old Indic texts were made in the late 1970ies, nobody could foresee that it would take only a few decades to reach the aim of putting scholarly investigations into the language and the contents of Vedic texts on an electronic basis. Beginning with the famous Texas version of the RV-Sa ˙ m hitā, several projects that were dedicated to the entry of Vedic texts were undertaken independently all over the world, in the US, Japan, and Europe, until in 1987, the common project of an electronic thesaurus of texts that are relevant for Indo-European studies was outlined by some Indo-Europeanists during a conference in Leiden / Netherlands. It goes without saying that within this project, which was later given the name of "TITUS" 1 , the corpus of Vedic texts plays a prominent role, and on the basis of a free exchange of data, the aim of being exhaustive in this respect has nearly been achieved; cp. table 1 below where those texts that have already been digitized or are at present being electronically prepared are listed 2. It is to be hoped that the existing gaps will soon be filled, provided contributors for the texts in question can be found. 1 "Thesaurus indogermanischer Text-und Sprachmaterialien" ("Thesaurus of Indo-European textual and linguistic material"). For the first announcement of the project, cf. GIPPERT (1987); for reports and descriptions, cf. GIPPERT (1995a), (1995b) and (1997a). 2 In the table, those texts that have already been worked on are marked (by a shadowed background). The state of the project is permanently documented in the WWW pages http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/texte2.htm and http://titus. fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/texte2.htm from which most of the Vedic texts are directly retrievable. For a special report about Old Indic and Iranian texts represented in the TITUS collection cf. GIPPERT (2000).