Intratext (was: Re: Mahabhasya now available in Intratext version)

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Just a word about this Intratext site.  I've been in touch with one of the 
staff there, Allesandra Allegretti, for a bit more than a year.  She has 
been consistently enthusiastic, and encouraged me to submit e-texts to 
their service.  There is no cost to me: they do everything, and have 
independent funding.  Although the site is mostly dedicated to western 
religious and historical texts, they seem very open to Sanskrit scholastic 
texts too, even medical and grammatical texts.  They get filed under 
"Hindu", but that hardly matters.  (I've mentioned this issue, but they 
haven't got round to changing it.)  Their general mission statement is 
here: http://www.intratext.com/info/infoedeng.HTM

It seems that the intratext project is well-enough funded that it is in a 
period of energetic growth and outreach.

It is hard to overstate the value of having someone else do the work of 
putting Indological e-texts into structured XML format on our behalf at no 
cost.

If we consider this is a useful way for our various Sanskrit texts to be 
incarnated, and there really seems to be nothing to lose, then it would 
probably be good if we had a discussion about priorities.  If Intratext 
continues to welcome Indic e-texts, what would we like to feed them next? 
The Mahabharata?  Kathasaritsagara? Tripitaka?

Perhaps Peter Schreiner's Brahmapurana, and other texts 
(http://www.indologie.unizh.ch/text/text.html) since they are well 
marked-up.  Good, clear markup is important if not essential for 
Intratext.  Verse numbers, adhyaya numbers, and so on should be clearly 
embedded in the text with some regular, predictable structure so that 
their conversion tools can get hold of such features without extensive 
human intervention.

Thoughts?

Best,
Dominik


-- 
Prof. Dominik Wujastyk
Visiting Associate Professor (Spring Semester '08)
Department of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/asianstudies/


On Thu, 8 May 2008, Jan E.M. Houben wrote:

> Anyway, thanks to George and others for making available a monumental research tool.
>  Please keep us posted on the updated version.
>  Jan Houben
>
> Kengo Harimoto <kengo.harimoto at UNI-HAMBURG.DE> wrote:
>  On May 6, 2008, at 15:13 , George Cardona wrote:
>
>> By the way, I think the base does not have the typo that shows up in
>> your message: ayAhi instead of AyAhi. I can't check because at the
>> moment I'm in Calcutta, writing from a cyber cafe. The Mahabhashya
>> files are also available in GRETIL.
>
> Speaking as one of those who converted the original files to text
> files, I have realized that the GRETIL version, as well as its source
> in Osaka, do have the problem of 'Ä?Ì?' ('a' with macron and acute)
> having become simply 'a'. I think we (or was it I?) introduced this
> error when removing accents. The original did have the correct
> reading (with accent). We will make an updated version ASAP.
>
>