SARIT: Enriching Digital Text Collections in Indology

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birgit Kellner
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 236347141

Sanskrit texts make up one of the richest cultural and intellectual archives of the premodern world, linked with deep traditions of sophisticated and systematic reflection on basic questions of the humanities. The SARIT project – Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts –, jointly proposed by partners in Columbia and Heidelberg, will develop and disseminate standards for Sanskrit texts, based on the widely-adopted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). High-quality digital editions of key texts will be produced in the three areas of Buddhist philosophy (especially epistemology and logic), Vedic hermeneutics, and literary theory, and made available for free download. With the further integration of two existing prosopographical and bibliographical databases, and with the addition of new features for reading, searching, annotating and analyzing these texts, SARIT will develop into an entirely new and collaborative platform for Indological research, standards-driven and extensible, tying in with ongoing development work at the Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA), a digital humanities division. SARIT’s structured and standards-compliant digital corpus will form a solid basis for the future development of advanced tools for textual analysis, which are sorely needed given the sheer magnitude of Sanskrit literature, and the complexity of intertextual relations and forms of textual transmission that are characteristic for it.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Sheldon Pollock