Category: Resources

Building on Peter’s post on textual scholarship in India, I’ve been searching for material since our workshop on Tuesday, trying to find data similar to the Great Plains project or the Vision of Britain website.

Scholars at the University of Tokyo are doing some very interesting work on HGIS for India: Ippei Sekido, “Historical GIS Materials for South Asia Studies in The University of Tokyo,” Journal of Urban and Rural Studies on Contemporary India 5, no. 2 https://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/hindas/PDF/jurci/5_2/02_sekido.pdf

They are using geographic data from a commercial provider: https://www.mlinfomap.com/Main/indiamaps.html

The Digital Library for South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago has a lot of statistics for the 19th century through to 1920. https://www.mlinfomap.com/Main/indiamaps.html They also have some digital maps, but they are not very high resolution.

The Internet Archive has a lot of Indian Census documents: https://archive.org/search.php?query=census%20india

Finally, the Census of India has a beta version of a digital library: http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/brief_history_of_census.aspx

What am I missing? Please add links in the comments section.

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).