Enhancing Access to Primary Cultural Heritage Materials of India

FAIN: PW-50408-09

Brown University (Providence, RI 02912-9100)
Peter M. Scharf (Project Director: August 2008 to April 2013)

A research and development project to produce software that would allow the searching of Sanskrit manuscripts and their integration into a digital library. The project would create a prototype based on the "Mahabharata" and the "Bhagavata Purana."

The proposed project aims to enhance access to primary cultural heritage materials of India housed in American libraries by integrating them with machine-readable texts, lexical resources, and linguistic software in a digital library of Sanskrit, one of the world's richest culture-bearing languages. Integrating primary cultural materials with the Sanskrit Library will enable broad use of Indic collections for research and education. The project develops a prototype using the collections of Sanskrit manuscripts in the libraries at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania. The result will be extendable to collections of Indic materials throughout the U.S. and the world and will serve as a model for digitization projects of cultural materials in other major culture-bearing languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.

Associated Products

Variations in Manuscripts (With reference to the Indic collections at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania) (Book Section)
Title: Variations in Manuscripts (With reference to the Indic collections at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania)
Author: Peter Scharf
Author: Anupama Ryali
Editor: Chaitali Dangarikar
Editor: Malhar Kulkarni
Abstract: Manuscripts vary in composition, script, hand, layout, design, color, numbering, and material, among other factors. Such variations reveal literary material not included in editions and also provide fundamental evidence for cultural and intellectual history. Variations and remarkable features of manuscripts in the Indic collections of Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania were discovered and annotated using the Sanskrit Image-Text Alignment software (SITA), developed in the NEH-funded project, ``Enhancing Access to Primary Cultural Heritage Materials of India''. The annotations allow systematic access to numerous types of remarkable features for the purpose of research and education.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/856989089
Primary URL Description: WorldCat permalink
Secondary URL: http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/014056835/catalog
Secondary URL Description: Hollis catalogue record permalink
Access Model: Sale
Publisher: D. K. Printworld
Book Title: Proceedings of the Fifth International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium (4--6 January 2013, IIT Bombay, Mumbai)
ISBN: 9788124606988

A Distributed Platform for Sanskrit Processing (Book Section)
Title: A Distributed Platform for Sanskrit Processing
Author: Peter Scharf
Author: Pawan Goyal
Author: Ge´rard Huet
Author: Amba Kulkarni
Author: Ralph Bunker
Editor: Christian Boitet
Editor: Martin Kay
Abstract: Sanskrit, the classical language of India, presents specific challenges for computational linguistics: exact phonetic transcription in writing that obscures word boundaries, rich morphology and an enormous corpus, among others. Recent international cooperation has developed innovative solutions to these problems and significant resources for linguistic research. Solutions include efficient segmenting and tagging algorithms and dependency parsers based on constraint programming. The integration of lexical resources, text archives and linguistic software is achieved by distributed interoperable Web services. Resources include a morphological tagger and tagged corpus.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://aclanthology.info/papers/proceedings-of-coling-2012
Primary URL Description: Association of Computational Linguistics Anthology
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/931496999
Secondary URL Description: WorldCat permalink
Access Model: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Nonported license
Publisher: International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Book Title: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, 8-15 December 2012

---