I am very pleased to announce that a project to
further develop the
SARIT
digital
corpus
has succeeded in attracting major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Profs. Sheldon Pollock (Columbia, New York) and Birgit Kellner (Heidelberg) applied to a bilateral USA-German funding program for the development of digital humanities. The application was a success, and the announcement can be read on the NEH website.
The SARIT website notes that,
The history of SARIT looks back to a meeting convened
by Prof. Richard Lariviere
at the University of Texas in 1988
that brought together
many specialists interested in creating a
"TLG for Indic," i.e., a corpus
of machine-readable texts in Indian languages.
The
minutes of that meeting still make interesting reading today,
and lay out some of the rationales underlying the present project. [...] Things have moved forward since 1988, especially in corpus linguistics,
computer networking, and encoding standards. SARIT takes advantage of
all these new developments, especially Unicode, XML and the Text Encoding Initiative.
Prof. Pollock and I both attended the 1988 meeting in Texas, and
the present project will go a large way towards fulfilling the ideas
that were born then.
I would like to take this opportunity to recognize the fine work of
other corpus projects in our field of indology, such as the Digital
Sanskrit Buddhist Canon, the DCS, Muktabodha, Indica & Buddhica, the Sanskrit Library, and
especially of course GRETIL and TITUS. All these projects have great
strengths, and afford important new ways of accessing and studying
Indian literatures. SARIT will
make its own unique contribution.
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
SARIT, INDOLOGY.