Last updated on Oct 31, 2016.
Digital analysis and processing of texts to accommodate the needs of Textual Studies and Criticism is one of the core areas of Digital Humanities from the very beginning. Experiments are continuously going on to create meaningful as well as easy-to-use platforms for presenting digital texts along with the results of analysis and supporting material regarding the genesis and/ or life of a text in various media, which is otherwise impossible to achieve in print format. With increasing availability of Indic literature in digital form in the Internet, the need for such platforms for critical editing, substantiating and annotating texts with material from different media has increased, helping establish the authenticity of the text, hence making it possible to cite and use in scholarly work. But the few tools created in abroad for this purpose fail to work properly in Indic languages. As part of my doctoral research, I worked on developing a digital platform called ‘Pathdarpan”. This was a reusable framework in which I arranged Bengali texts along with manuscript images, digital transcription, notes on texts, text comparison results, audio-video material related to particular portions of the texts, images of performance. It also included an editor to add notes on the texts online (by a visitor or collaborating text editors).
Taking this as a basis to start the discussion, this workshop proposes to look at the needs and challenges of text processing and archiving along with multimedia material, and the possibilities of such digital platforms for scholarly editing in Indic languages. We invite discussion on ideas of useful tools in the field of Indic text processing and presenting, and features and facilities that an ideal digital multimedia text archive or collaborative editing platform should have.
We would start discussing our personal experience of working with textual tools in Indic language, especially Bengali, and the platform ‘Pathdarpan’ as a way of negotiation. This would in turn open up conversations on the needs and challenges of the field. We encourage participants to come up with ideas of useful tools in the field of Indic text processing and presenting, as well as thoughts about features and facilities that an ideal digital multimedia text archive or collaborative editing platform should have. The discussion will be open for comments and questions at any point.
A note recording and discussing the conversations at the session will be ideal.
Not applicable.
Spandana Bhowmik has a PhD in Digital Humanities under the supervision of prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She was a Charles Wallace fellow, a visiting fellow at the Scholars' Lab, University of Virginia and British Library, UK. She has been working at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, for the last ten years on digital text processing and archiving. She was part of the digital development team for Bichitra: The Online Tagore Variorum project. She has recently joined India Foundation for the Arts as an archivist where her responsibility is to create a digital as well as physical archive of the Foundation's 20 years' work in the field of Arts.
Sunanda Bose is a Senior Research Fellow at School of Mobile Computing and Communication, Jadavpur University. He is currently working on developing a framework for healthcare services using mobile and. sensor-cloud technologies. He was part of the digital development team for Bichitra: The Online Tagore Variorum project by the School of Cultural Text and Records, Jadavpur University. He has also worked as a freelancer and was a software developer in Boolean Array IT services LLP, Kolkata.