soc.culture.india

[Dominik Wujastyk]

  > : i would like to have a look at a list called
      soc.culture.india on usenet, but don't know how to reach it.

Dear Thomas,
 
There are hundreds of subject-wise discussion groups available
through the Usenet system.  Also known as Netnews.  As far as I
know, this is only accessible if you have an account on a networked
Unix machine.  Unix has some utilities for reading this news, which
appears to the user a bit like email.  If you have a Unix account,
try the commands "rn" (for "read news") or "nn"  (net news).  If you
don't have a Unix machine, then probably you just can't get the
news.  There may be some sort of news reader under VMS, since that
operating system tries hard to keep up with the facilities offered by Unix.
:-)  Poor DEC.  Fancy inventing the wrong operating system.  I
suppose Apishali and the others must have felt that way when they
saw the Ashtadhyayi!
 
I used to follow the soc.culture.india group at one time.  I stopped
becuase the volume of messages was too high.  I would not be unusual
to find upwards of thirty messages a day.  Also, the subject matter
was too contemporary for me.  Hindi movies, current politics, arguments
about caste, etc.  Wonderful material for a sociologist, though.
 
      i also dug out from the old logs on the indology list references to
      a Sanskrit Text Archive and would like to know the state of affairs.
      we are collecting materials for a Tamil Text Archive and could profit
      from previous experience (i have seen the report on the STA conference 19
  > 88).
 
I hope Richard Lariviere will answer this for you.  Briefly, as I understand
it, Austin has undertaken to provide a digital Ramayana text, but no more.
A digital Mahabharata is underway in Delhi.  I saw the project a couple
of months ago, and can report more later.  But the prospect of having something
usable in the forseeable future is slim.  (E.g., there's only one typist!)
 
The most important work in digitizing texts currently being done is that
of Prof.  Peter Schreiner, at Zurich.  Again, I hope I can nudge him
into giving a brief account of what he has done (Peter?).  Apart from
the sheer volume of texts that Peter has typed, his work is of special
value because he analyses sandhi and compounds as he goes, and no
program to do this successfully has yet been released.
 
Dominik