Digital editor
Great to see the ferment of ideas and reactions in all the blog posts appearing overnight!
I mentioned the book by Adluni and Bagchee about the state of textual scholarship on the Mabhabarata. You can read the introduction on Academia.
At the end of my lecture on Textual Scholarship on Wednesday 11 December, I asked everyone to turn on their phones, go to PlayStore or the AppStore, and find the “General Prologue” App. Everyone seemed to do so! Indeed, Google Play tells me that 21 people in Indian downloaded the App yesterday. Thank you! (Apple, through the App store, claims that no-one downloaded the Apple version, but I don’t believe them).
We would love some feedback on the App! Did you get it? Load it? Open it? Did it work? Did it make sense? Was it interesting, useful? Comments please.
Not very surprisingly, the examples I showed of digital editions from Europe and north America led to the question: are there editions like these made in India, of Indian texts? and if there are not: why not? and can they be made?
Answering the first question: there is a ferment of activity in the area of digital texts in India. A quick Google search reveals, instantly, http://indology.info/etexts/, produced by my long-time colleague at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Dominik Wujastyk. This lists over thirty digital archives of Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit texts, and much more besides. I mentioned in my talk on Wednesday 11 December the work done by Wendy Philips-Rodriguez on the Mahrabharata, following on from the work of her Cambridge supervisor, John Smith, in which she applied the same methods of phylogenetic analysis based on computer-assisted collation that I showed on Wednesday. You can see articles by her at her Academia site, I recommend her article on Chi-squares and the Phenomenon of “Change of Exemplar” in the Dyūtaparvan, also published in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg: Springer, 2009, pp. 380-390. You can find some discussion of her work in the recent Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahabharata Textual Criticism (Adluri and Bagchee, Anthem Press, 2018). However, as I said, her work is not based on original transcription of manuscripts (though she does check her texts against manuscripts).
Winter Institute in Digital Humanities 