Machine-readable version of the Mahabharata and Prof. Daniel Ingalls

[George Hart]

I just received the following note from Dan Ingalls, Jr., the son of  
Prof. Ingalls.

> I recently transcribed a tape of a talk my father and I gave (a  
> quarter of a century ago ;-), and got interested again in the topic  
> of producing a machine-readable version of the Mahabharata.  We  
> dropped the project back in 1980 because it seemed like a lot of  
> work, and it wasn't clear that it made more sense to pay for  
> technology than to pay real people who needed jobs to do the work.
>
> However I still have an unbound copy of the Bandarkar edition, I  
> know some people at Google who might be willing to do the scanning  
> (I don't know this for sure), and on todays machines the processing  
> would not be a huge amount of work.  I think my modest Macintosh  
> could probably do a page a second.
>
> My question to you is this:  Has this already been done, by hand or  
> otherwise and, if not, is it still something that would be of value?  
> A side-effect of reviving the project would be to dust off my tools  
> and make them available to other workers in the field. My programs  
> were all written in my own language (Smalltalk) that only ran on  
> special hardware at the time, but there is now an open-source  
> version that runs on just about every computer and operating system.

I am posting this (with Dan's permission) for comments.  My own  
feeling is that if Dan has an unbound copy, he could run it through a  
scanning machine and make available a graphic version -- surely the  
BORS edition of the MBh is one of the great achievements of 20th  
century scholarship in any field.  I don't know whether it is still  
under copyright.  As far as scanning it goes, I think the wiggly lines  
under many words would pose a problem -- and it would be almost  
impossible to scan the apparatus criticus, which is of course a vital  
part of the work.  But with Dan's fluency in smalltalk, perhaps these  
issues could be overcome.

For anyone interested in seeing Prof. Ingalls giving a lecture in 1980  
on this project, see

http://vimeo.com/4714623

George Hart