[INDOLOGY] Digital Editions of Sanskrit texts

[Patrick McAllister]

On Wed, Jan 19 2022, Bihani Sarkar via INDOLOGY wrote:

> Dear List members
> A warm thanks to Dr. Ruppel, Prof. Olivelle, Dr Birch and others for their
> responses and further questions.
>
> To clarify one question: by digital edition I mean not a digital text of
> the sort available on GRETIL for example, but something more, like this:
> https://editions.byzantini.st/ChronicleME/#/home

Dear Birhani,

the edition you point to here is based to a large part on a set of XML
documents encoded according to the guidelines of the TEI
(https://tei-c.org/).  There are several projects in the field of this
list that, like Andrews’s project, follow the TEI’s guidelines for
encoding their sources.  These guidelines can be applied to a wide
variety of sources (inscriptions, manuscripts, printed books, etc.) and
for very different purposes (diplomatic and critical editions, texts
optimised for searching, etc.).  Example projects (apart from that of
Charles Li which Richard mentioned) are https://github.com/erc-dharma/
and https://github.com/sarit/.

What you see at the link you mentioned is a specialised application for
reading those TEI encoded files.  The applications (usually dynamic web
sites) that allow you to read these file will look quite different,
depending on each project’s aims and means, even if the underlying
source files are encoded in a similar fashion.  I don’t know of a case
yet, for example, that connects transcripts of South Asian manuscripts
to map data.

There is also a Special Interest Group for encoding Indic texts at the
TEI, with their own mailing list:
https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIG:IndicTexts

You don’t have to be a member of the TEI to join that mailing list, and
it is a good place to ask more technical questions about TEI encoding.

P.S.: Tara Andrews’s workflow is actually a bit more complicated than I
said, see: https://editions.byzantini.st/ChronicleME/#/Methods.  But it
is still true that the TEI XML files are central in the tool chain.

With best wishes, 

-- 
Patrick McAllister
long-term email: pma at rdorte.org