New version of the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit

[Oliver Hellwig]

Dear list,

I would like to announce a new version of the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit at 
http://kjc-fs-cluster.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/dcs/

The new version includes new texts, a new layout, and new features (refer to 
http://kjc-fs-cluster.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/dcs/index.php?
contents=help_center
for details).

I suppose that the topic search may be the most interesting feature of this 
version. During the last few years, I have assigned topics such as 
"Medicine", "dharma" or "politics" to chapters in the Sanskrit corpus (for 
those of you present at the DICSEP at Dubrovnik: These topics are not 
identical with those in my presentation!). The menu item "Topics" directs 
you to the site where the top categories are displayed. Use the list to view 
the subtopics and their references.
Some caveats when using this feature:
	a) I did NOT assign topics to all chapters.
	b) Topics reflect my ideas about the content of a chapter, and are, 
therefore, open to any kind of discussion. Please remind that this function 
was (and is) not a primary scientific aim of the corpus, but just an add-on.
	c) I tried to use the Library of Congress classification system as 
guide for designing the topic hierarchy when I started annotating the 
chapters. It soon became apparent that this system may not be the best 
choice for classifying Indian literature. Therefore, some parts of the 
hierarchy (e.g., on medicine) may seem a bit more structured than other 
ones.
	d) Finally, some chapters were assigned to topics using a "batch 
function"; this means that, for example, all chapters in alchemical texts 
were assigned globally to the topic "Alchemy". This may result in wrong 
attributions in some cases (chapters of alchemical texts that do not contain 
any alchemical content etc.).
	
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PD Dr. Oliver Hellwig
Department of Classical Indology, South-Asia Institute
University of Heidelberg, Germany