Elena Mucciarelli & Heike Oberlin (ed). [2016, in preparation]. Paper & Pixel: Digital Humanities in Indology. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
The main aim of this special issue is to highlight the heuristic potential of Digital Humanities to the study of South Asia.
With regard to manuscripts, rare books as well as multimedia documentations (audio, video, photos), the process of digitizing, structuring and encoding represents a mile stone for any further analysis of big data, their edition and preservation. Additionally, by using means of the Digital Humanities, textual sources can be analysed in multiple ways and there are chances for new interdisciplinary approaches such as the study presented by Matthias Lang. Actually there are quite a lot of projects in international Indology starting to apply methods of Digital Humanities to Indological resources (corpora), as, e.g., the one accounted for by Heike Oberlin. This book joins together scholars with multiple expertise such as Peter Gietz and Oliver Hellwig, and offers a platform for exchange of knowledge and best practice.
In particular, the issues related to digitization and further processing of big data are not exactly the same in the Indian context as those the Digital Humanities in general deal with. Apart from geographical and cultural conditions, an example might be the variety of languages and scripts and how they are employed – the same language is often written in different scripts. Another important feature is the usage of palm-leaves bound together like loose-leaf collections, so different texts and parts of texts are often consolidated in a single manuscript. This has to be considered when developing corresponding interchangeable encoding standards, based on the document type definitions by the Text Encoding Initiative.
The digitization project of the 18 volumes of the Epigraphia Carnatica shall serve as a demonstrator for the fruitful application of digital methods in the context of Indian text based history (Bignami & Mucciarelli): These volumes contain more than 9,000 inscriptions and entail an overwhelming amount of data that can be pinpointed to different topics. Due to the sophisticated intellectual project that laid at its conception, the printed copy is difficult to use. Therefore the different dimensions, chronological as well as geographical, and the different levels of information in the Epigraphia Carnatica can serve as data for new research only by digitization and encoding the information. This kind of record represents a unique reference for Indian history because it conveys material not found elsewhere. Furthermore the Epigraphia Carnatica itself is extremely rare: even in Indian libraries there is no complete edition available.