We are pleased to announce the availability of a digital version of the Pali Text Society’s Pali‐English Dictionary as part of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī system. This valuable addition now makes it possible for users of this website to compare both Sanskrit and Pali lexical information while consulting the Dictionary of Gāndhārī. The PTSD remains under copyright by the Pali Text Society. Special thanks are due to the Council of the PTS (and to Rupert Gethin in particular) for granting their kind permission to provide this digital version on Gandhari.org, as well as to James Nye of the Digital South Asia Library for generously sharing the DSAL’s digitization of the PTSD on which our version builds.
December 4, 2011
Stefan Baums
One central task for the upcoming years will be the migration of the database underlying the Dictionary, Bibliography and Catalog from its current custom PostgreSQL schema to a more standardized and maintainable infrastructure. In the roadmap that we developed for the Bavarian Academy’s Gāndhārī research center, much of the initial technical work concerns the conversion of the database’s content to an XML schema following the Text Encoding Initiative’s guidelines and compatible with the EpiDoc TEI application. We are planning to use the eXist XML database server to host our data, and will carry out customizations and extensions as needed. The presentation of our source data will also make extensive use of links between transliterated text and manuscript or inscription images. We anticipated that we would have to develop much of the code for this ourselves, but in the meantime, the TILE project (based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Indiana University) has implemented a solid foundation for what we need, and we will be able to contribute to their existing codebase and customize it rather than having to develop a TEI‐based text‐image linking mechanism from scratch. This will free up resources for the last major component of our digital roadmap: the development of an infrastructure for preparing as much as possible of our publications (text editions and reference works) within the database system, with largely automated production of online and print versions as individual publications reach completion.
November 12, 2011
Stefan Baums
This blog starts off with happy news. Earlier this week, the Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz von Bund und Ländern approved the establishment of a new center for Gāndhārī manuscript studies at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (the Academy’s press release is available here). The new center will have a runtime of twenty‐one years (2012–32) and provide four research positions and one technical position, under the direction and active participation of Jens‐Uwe Hartmann and Harry Falk. During the first fourteen years (2012–25), the center will contribute to completing the edition of all currently known Gāndhārī manuscripts in close collaboration with Gāndhārī scholars worldwide. The last seven years (2026–32) are devoted to the compilation of comprehensive reference works on Gāndhārī language and literature and the history of Buddhism in Gandhāra. The center will provide open access to the results of its work online as well as producing print publications, and it will actively contribute to the development of digital tools for the analysis and presentation of Gāndhārī source material and research results. At the same time as the establishment of the Bavarian Academy’s Gāndhārī research center in Munich, the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project at the University of Washington received renewed support from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the years 2011–14, and a growing number of individual scholars wordwide contribute to Gāndhārī studies or integrate Gāndhārī material into their work in related fields. Both the Bavarian Academy’s Gāndhārī research center and the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project will support and train Ph.D. students, the former through two positions offered in conjunction with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the latter through a scholarship offered with support from the Dhammachai International Research Institute. As editors of the Dictionary, Bibliography and Catalog, we will continue our work under the auspices of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project, and with much greater resources at our disposal for improving our technical infrastructure and the completeness and accuracy of our reference works. We note (not without a sigh of relief) that after a number of lean years, the mid- and long-term future of Gāndhārī studies is now secure and looking brighter than ever.
November 12, 2011
Stefan Baums