Ushering the heritage of India into the digital age
Speaker: Prof. Peter Scharf (Department of Classics at Brown University, USA)
Organiser : Department of Indology, French Institute of Pondicherry.
Abstract
Prof. Peter Scharf is engaged in a collaborative project to develop an integrated international digital Sanskrit library. Under a three-year project, funded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Intelligent Systems, he integrated linguistic software modeling Paninian derivation, inflection and sandhi rules with bilingual lexical resources digitized in the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon project, and machine-readable Sanskrit texts in the TITUS archive at Frankfurt. Simultaneously this work facilitated the development of Devanagari optical character recognition software by his collaborator at the Center for Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition at Buffalo. Scharf aims to build an integrated digital library that allows seemless access to grammatical information and lexical sources by clicking words in texts, and access to citations in context by clicking citations in lexical sources. The system will facilitate linguistic, philological, and topical research in Sanskrit generally, much as the Perseus project has in Classical philology. In his current project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is extending the facilities of the digital library to manuscript images. The project aligns digital manuscript images of the Mahabharata and Bhagavatapurana in the Brown University Library and the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania with machine-readable texts and develops word-spotting technology to highlight sought passages in the manuscript images.
