Machine-readable sanskrit texts

[l.m.fosse at NO.UIO.EASTEUR-ORIENT]

Dear list members,
 
I am looking for people who are willing to share/swap machine-readable
sanskrit texts with me.
 
A few words about myself:
 
As of August '92, I am a research fellow at the University of Oslo. I am
trying to localize machine-readable texts, partly  - and preferably - to be
used in my project, partly to be part of an electronic library that I hope
to establish here at our institute. So far, I have received a couple of
texts from the Oxford Text Archive, and I am in the process of downloading
texts from the Liverpool Indology database, as some of may have discovered
due to a mistake of mine.
 
A few words about my project: I have given my thesis the tentative title
"In Search of Discriminators: The Crux of Chronology in Sanskrit
Literature". In other words, I plan a statistical study of the language in
sanskrit (and possibly prakrit and pali) texts to see if syntactic or other
features are distributed differently in texts of different age, and in such
a manner that you can trace a development over the centuries. I start with
texts the relative chronology of which is known, and hope to isolate
features that will enable myself and others to seriate other texts.
Luckily, this kind of problem is not unheard of in statistics - methods
have already been developed, and I have established contact with persons
who - I hope - can guide me throught the maze of problems you encounter in
this kind of work. As for the texts, I concentrate upon narrative prose and
verse.
 
I am of course entering texts myself (I have started with the
Tantrakhyayika, entering the fables), and I am naturally willing to share
my texts with others. I plan to run my files through the TACT Text
Analyser, and the format of my files (and the tags I use) must be
compatible with the functionality of this program. (I therefore create
padapatha-like sanskrit texts where sandhi has been eliminated, and my tags
should preferably be identifyable by TACT as "words", so that the program
will establish the necessary counts and basic statistics).
 
I would also be grateful for information about computer programs relevant
to Indologists (I have already acquired Mr. Emmerick's program), and I
would like to know if others work with statistical methods. Tagging systems
are also of great interest to me.
 
Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse
Lars Martin Fosse
Department of East European
and Oriental Studies
P. O. Box 1030, Blindern
N-0315 OSLO Norway
 
Tel: 02-85 68 48
 
E-mail: fosse at hedda.uio.no