The author is Dr Charles Li.
That's me!
Saktumiva is part of an ongoing effort to produce critical
editions starting from diplomatically* transcribing manuscripts.
Then, at the collation stage, common orthographic variants are
filtered out automatically — this can be configured depending on
what you want to see in your apparatus. The idea is to keep as
much information intact as possible, so that later scholars can
reproduce the work and easily critically evaluate the decisions
that went into it.
Here is a shameless plug for a text that I recently edited in this way, the story of King Śibi in the Vahnipurāṇa:
https://alt.cardiffuniversitypress.org/articles/10.18573/alt.58
The article is accompanied by a digital edition, here:
The digital edition includes diplomatic transcriptions of every witness, alignments of every verse in the text, and images of the manuscripts or printed books that are transcribed, where possible. The idea is that the work should be reproducible, like "Real Science" — following a series of steps, you should be able to either reproduce that text that I've critically edited, or else make different decisions that will give you a different text. (I imagine I'm not the only person who has struggled with interpreting a critical text, only to spend ages tracking down the sources and finally discovering that the editor just misread an akṣara.) Making all of the material available will also hopefully make it easier for scholars to re-use the work in the future, whether for simple text mining, or analyzing text reuse, or for creating new critical texts.
Best,
Charles
*As the foregoing conversation demonstrates, transcription is inherently an interpretive act, and scholarly practice with respect to diplomacy varies widely. But even mechanical reproduction is inherently interpretive — for example, colour calibration in photography, and this famous case of photocopier error: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2015/0823_video_slides_xerox_talk_froscon
The author is Dr Charles Li. There's more information at the Github site: https://github.com/chchch/upama .
See also,
- Reconstructing a Sanskrit text
- For further discussion of the methodology behind Saktumiva, see Li 2017: 305-310 and Li 2018, ch.4.
On Sat, 25 Mar 2023 at 17:40, Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier@gmail.com> wrote:
Dominik,Could you tell us a little more about saktumIva (saktumiva.org). The website tells us what it does, but I couldn't find a page that gave some history of it, who its principals were etc.Saktumiva is a platform for producing and publishing critical editions of Sanskrit texts. Users can produce transcriptions of documents, such as manuscripts or printed editions, and then automatically collate them to produce an apparatus of variants.
Thanks,Harry Spier
On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 7:20 PM Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com> wrote:
Quite. In the Suśruta Project's edition we've gone with geminated consonants (karmma, karttā) and some other odd sandhi choices (evaṅ guṇam) because they are sanctioned by Pāṇini. It's going to make our edition a bit odd for readers who are used to smoothed-out Sanskrit. But it's grammatically correct. And that's another editorial assumption: we assume that our author(s) know grammar. That can also be tricky, if we think there are maybe some dialectical features appearing. Luckily, the SS is a good example of classical Sanskrit. Separating error from dialect or language drift, the BHS problem, is extra challenging.
Best,Dominik
On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 at 21:39, Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier@gmail.com> wrote:
Point taken Dominik. You wrote:
One has two files. The first is the diplomatic transcription (karmma, vindu, adhiṣṭāna). The second is whatever one wants it to be, but it's interpretative or normalized.
I think another reason, in addition to all the reasons you gave for what you suggest. I.e. "first is the diplomatic transcription" and only then to create a "normalized" file, is that deciding whats normal is sometimes a judgement call . There may be more than one norm. For example:Monier-Williams dictionary has pattra and chattra but Apte's dictionary has patra and chatra .
Harry Spier
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