Digital text projects at Columbia

[Andrew Ollett]

Dear all,

It's important for groups working on digital text projects to be aware
of what other groups are doing---so that we don't duplicate
digitization efforts, so that we maintain standards, and so that new
technological developments don't pass us by. Many of you may know that
some new digitization work is proceeding under the umbrella of SARIT
(http://sarit.indology.info/), which we hope will develop into a
repository and search interface for high-quality digital texts in
Indian languages.

A small group at Columbia University (Sheldon Pollock and myself) have
gotten a number of texts keyed in, which we will transform into
TEI-quality XML and which we will make available to the wider world of
Indological scholarship through SARIT. One is the Nāṭyaśāstra,
including the Abhinavabhāratī, in the GOS edition. Those who have
worked with these texts know how uncertain and in many cases
unsatisfactory they are, and might have imagined how a
fully-searchable text would improve the processes of evaluating
readings and emendation (besides the general usefulness of being able
to easily locate particular subjects, phrases, words, etc.). We have
also digitized some Prakrit texts, including the Līlāvaī and the
Vajjālaggaṃ. We are insisting on rich markup, which means that these
digital texts will have features that others don't often have: variant
readings and other textual notes, references to the root text (for
commentaries) and citations of other texts, markup of quoted text,
proper names, etc. Also, crucially, we can easily go between
transliterated and devanāgarī versions of all of the texts. Right now
PhiloLogic (the software that SARIT uses) doesn't exactly let us
capitalize on these features, but we are developing improvements to
this system (using XML stylesheets).

The texts will be made available once they're fully prepared and once
SARIT is equipped to deal with them---I would say in at least a year.
In the meantime, members of the INDOLOGY list should be aware of the
project so that you (or your colleagues) don't duplicate these efforts
(a risk that the people at SARIT have also been attentive to), and so
that you can offer your suggestions on any aspect of the project,
which are most welcome. If any of you are particularly interested in
seeing these texts, or if you want to get involved in digitization
efforts like these, please contact me.

Andrew Ollett
PhD student/Columbia