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 I developed for the Bavarian Academy’s Gandhāra project, 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. I 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.
Bright Prospects for Gāndhārī Studies
Earlier this week, the Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz von Bund und Ländern approved the establishment of a new project in Gandhāran manuscript studies at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The project will have a runtime of twenty‐one years (2012–32) and provide four research positions and one technical position. During the first fourteen years (2012–25), the project will contribute to the edition of the currently known Gāndhārī manuscripts in close collaboration with scholars worldwide, and undertake a complementary survey and study of the Sanskrit manuscript tradition of Gandhāra. The last seven years (2026–32) are devoted to the compilation of comprehensive reference works on the languages, literature and history of Buddhism in Gandhāra. The project 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 textual source material and research results. At the same time as the establishment of the Bavarian Academy’s Gandhāra project 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 contribute to Gandhāran studies or use source material from Gandhāra in their work in related fields. Both the Bavarian Academy’s Gandhāra project and the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project will support and train Ph.D. students, the former through a position 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 in conjunction with the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project as well as the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and with much greater resources at our disposal for improving the technical infrastructure of Gandhari.org 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.