Table Of ContentDigital Humanities and Buddhism
Introductions to
Digital Humanities – Religion
Edited by
Claire Clivaz, Charles M. Ess, Gregory Price Grieve,
Kristian Petersen, Sally Promey
Volume 1
Digital Humanities
and Buddhism
An Introduction
Edited by
Daniel Veidlinger
ISBN 978-3-11-051836-8
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-051908-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-051839-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933231
Bibliografic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliografic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover image: Social network visualization. With friendly permission of Martin Grandjean.
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Table of Contents
Daniel Veidlinger
Introduction 1
Ilona Budapesti
Past, Present, and Future of Digital Buddhology 25
Part One: Theoretical and Methodological Issues
Daniel Veidlinger
Computational Linguistics and the Buddhist Corpus 43
Gregory Price Grieve
An Ethnographic Method for the Digital Humanistic Study of Buddhism 59
Part Two: Digital Conservation, Presentation and Archiving
Kuo-Ming Tang and Shu-Kai Hsieh
Ontologizing Buddhist Digital Archives: Two Case Studies 77
Paul G. Hackett
Digital Encoding, Preservation, Translation, and Research for Tibetan
Buddhist Texts 91
Miroj Shakya
The Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon Project: Problems and
Possibilities 111
David Wharton
Digital Libraries of Lao and Northern Thai Manuscripts 127
A. Charles Muller
The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary: A Brief
History 143
VI TableofContents
Part Three: Digital Analysis of Buddhist Documents
Christopher Jensen
Mapping Religious Practice in the Eminent Monks: Theoretical and
Methodological Reflections 159
Christopher Handy
A Context-Free Method for the Computational Analysis of Buddhist
Texts 183
James B. Apple
Digital Filiation Studies: Phylogenetic Analysisin the Study of Tibetan
Buddhist Canonical Texts 209
Appendix: Selected Digital Humanities Resources 227
Index 231
Daniel Veidlinger
Introduction
The Digital Humanities are a new way of approaching traditional Humanities
disciplines using the analytic and display powers of computers and digital net-
workstogainnovelandinmanycasesdeeperinsightsintoquestionsatthecen-
terofHumanitiesresearch.SomeviewDigitalHumanitiesasawaytoassistmore
traditionalresearchprojects,perhapsusingmoreheavilydata-drivenmethodol-
ogies,butothers hail it as an entirelydisruptive enterprise that seeks tofunda-
mentally alter the way the Humanities are done (Gold 2012, x).While the tools
may be different, the traditional focus on language, texts, art, culture and
ideas remains the same.There is no one definition of what Digital Humanities
are and no one methodology that all Digital Humanities scholars use, but
what they all have in common is a willingness to implement the latest techno-
logical developments to assist in the archiving, analysis and dissemination of
the subjects in which they are interested, and to supplement the critical and
speculative perspectives associated with the Humanities with a more empirical
and data-driven approach.¹ However one defines it, there is no doubt that, as
Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto announcein their primer for the Digital Hu-
manities,“The arrayof platforms,applications,techniques andtools,all devel-
opedundertherubricof ‘digital,’havebeendramaticallychangingthewaythat
humanists work, how they do research, gather information, organize, analyze
and interpret it, and disseminate findings” (Gardiner and Musto 2015, 3).
Just as the idea of the “Humanities” spans a vast and contested field, so
there aremany valences of the term“Digital.” At root,digital information is in-
formation that has been encoded and reduced into a binary series of ones and
zeros that represent the original data and can be displayed once again through
appropriatedecoding.BecauseDigitalMediareducealltext,imagesandsounds
tonumericalcodes,theycanconsequentlybedescribedinmathematicalterms,
GeoffreyRockwellattheUniversityofAlbertahasbroughttogetheranumberofscholarsand
asked them to define Digital Humanities.Their varied responses include such definitions as
“AnythingaHumanitiesscholardoesthatismediateddigitally,especiallywhensuchmediation
opensdiscussionbeyondasmallcircleofacademicspecialists”,“Theprocessofmodeling,in-
sertingrawinformationavailablethroughbooks,journalsandotherresourcesintoadatabase
andvisualizingittotheuser”,“Thedigitalhumanitiesiswhateverwemakeittobe”and“A
delimiting hiatus (an anagram of ‘digital humanities’).” For the full list see http://www.
artsrn.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digi
tal_Humanities%3F
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110519082-001
2 DanielVeidlinger
manipulatedalgorithmically,andsubjectedtoanalmostinfinitevarietyofcom-
putationalprocedures,manyofwhicharedescribedinlucidtermsintheexcel-
lentintroductorytexteditedbyConstance,LaneandSiemens(2017).Computers
armed with digital information don’t just make representations of the world as
literaryor artistic works do, but rather they supplement this with the ability to
manipulate these representations and model new possibilities (Smith 1995,
460). These models, operating within the heuristic sphere of the Humanities,
take“imperfectlyarticulatedknowledge”(McCarty2005,194)andhelpustocul-
tivate better comprehension of the subject through further computational oper-
ations upon the model.
Thevariousfeaturesofthedigitalopenupvastnewvistasforanalysis,ma-
nipulation and transformation of the information so encoded. For example,
whereas it is quite difficult to alter a photographic negative on film using
hand-retouchingorchemicalagents,adigitalimagecanbealteredprogrammati-
callybychangingthebinarycodethatrepresentstheimage(Manovich2001,10).
Amongsttheonesandzerosthatencodeanddescribetheimage,theremaybea
series001100thatrepresentsthecolorgreen,andthiscanbechangedtoblueby
simplyreplacingthiswiththecodeforthatcolor,say000011.Anitemthatisdig-
itallyencodedresistsdecayovertime(aslongastechnologiesexisttodecodeit)
and maintains a high degree of fidelity during the copying process, features
whichmakedigitalmediaidealforthepreservationanddisseminationofinfor-
mation.Whereas an audio recording on magnetic tape loses some quality and
fidelityeach time it is played and even more so each time it is copied,adigital
MP3musicfile,forexample,canbeplayedorcopiedoverandoverwithoutsuf-
feringanyloss of quality, and each copystands as aperfect replica of the orig-
inal, sounding exactly the same. Likewise, a manuscript can be damaged or
smudged with each reading and the leaves, paper, bark or other material can
rot over time. A photograph of the manuscript on film may help this situation
somewhat,butitcanalsobleedcolorovertime,curlandgetotherwisedamaged.
However,adigitalimageofthemanuscriptremainsthesameforever(again,as
longastechnologyremainstodecodeit).Ofcourse,asJohannaDrucker,director
ofUCLA’sDigitalHumanitiesprogramremindsus,“Thebenefitsofbeingableto
encodeinformation,knowledge,artifacts,andothermaterialsindigitalformatis
always in tensionwith the liabilities—the loss of information from an analogue
object,or,inthecaseofaborn-digitalartifact,itsfragilitytomigrationandup-
grade” (Drucker et al 2014,9).
Another keyfeature of Digital Media that bears mentioning is that theyen-
ablerandomaccesstodatajustlikehumanmemorydoes.Thisisquitedifferent
from older forms of electric communication, such as cassette tapes or films,
whichhavetobeplayedthroughinalinearmannerinordertofindtheinforma-
Introduction 3
tion for which one is searching. Digital Media also can be connected into com-
plex networks of exchange that communicate with each other through binary
code and open up unprecedented opportunities for collaborative research.This
networking feature allows digital archives, for example, to store an enormous
amount of material that has been centralized from locations all over the
world, obviating the need to travel to these archives in order to do research
usingtheircollections.Digitaltechnologiesaredistinctforbeinghighlyscalable,
meaningthattheycanbeexpandedrelativelyeasilytoperformlargerandlarger
quantities of workas necessary, and for being modular, meaning that theycan
beseparatedasdiscreteunitsandcombinedindifferentwaysinordertobecus-
tomized for different tasks. All of these features of digital technologies will be
coveredinthevariouschaptersofthisvolume,andtheirapplicationspecifically
to Buddhist studies will be addressed.
Therehasbeenafairdegreeofdebateabouttheusefulness,desirabilityand
effectivenessoftheDigitalHumanities,andtherearedifferingviewsonthisfrom
differentsectors.SomeDigitalHumanitiestechniquesthatatfirstseemedprom-
ising have perhaps led to poor or inadequate results, but open-minded inquiry
and continual iterations may well serve to improve those areas in the future.²
This is a field that, while not as new as some might think,³ can nevertheless
be said to be in its infancy, if only in terms of the untapped potential that it
has, and with thoughtful development of the various methods associated with
this field, it is likely that evergreater contributions will be made.
It may very well be that digital and computational approaches will eventu-
ally become so integrated into the Humanities that the idea of the Digital Hu-
manities as a separate discipline or mode of inquiry will coalesce into the Hu-
manities more generally, and the techniques that now come under that rubric
will be just another set of tools for Humanists to use (Gardiner and Musto
2015,2).Tosomeextent,weareallDigitalHumanistsnow,andtheidentification
of a scholar or project as associated with the Digital Humanities may really be
TomScheinfeldthasdiscussedsomeofthesuccessesandfailuresofDigitalHumanitiesto
poseandanswerconsequentialquestions.Hesuggeststhatitmaybethat,likeothernewtech-
nologies,itmaytakesometimebeforetheirfullusebecomesapparent,andthetheoreticalis-
sues salienttothesespecificmethods mayalsomakethemselves clearer withthepassage of
time(2012).
ThefirstprojectthatisgenerallyassociatedwiththeDigitalHumanities,orHumanitiescom-
putingasitwasfirstcalled,washeadedbyJesuitscholarRobertoBusawhobuilttheIndexTho-
misticusstartingin1949.ThisisamassiveconcordanceoftheworksofChristiantheologianTho-
masAquinasthatenlistedIBManditscomputerstoassistinlemmatizationofthewordsbeing
indexedaswellassearchandretrievalofinformationfortheprojectfromthemassivebodyof
materialproducedbythismedievalscholar.
4 DanielVeidlinger
one ofdegreerather than kind. Howmanyof those whorail against the Digital
Humanitiesinsistonusingacardcatalogueinsteadofweb-baseddigitallibrary
catalogues? The electronic catalog is really just one kind of Digital Humanities
toolthatreflectsmanyofthekeyelementsofDigitalHumanities:itiseasilyac-
cessible from any location with an Internet connection, it uses computerized
search to unearth data in seconds rather than a lengthy and laborious manual
examination of text, and it includes a copious amount of metadata, that is,
data about the data that allows for easier sorting. It also, incidentally, requires
an enormous amount of human-performed work to be done in order to enter
the data in the initial phase,which has also been typical of Digital Humanities
projects.Infact,oneofthereasonsthatDigitalHumanitiesisgainingsuchtrac-
tionnowisthatsomuchhasalreadybeendigitizedthatwecanoftenskipthese
labor-intensiveinitialphasesandgorightintoanalysisofthedigitallyavailable
material.AsMatthewJockerspointsout,“Thoughnot‘everything’hasbeendigi-
tized,wehavereachedatippingpoint,aneventhorizonwhereenoughtextand
literature have been encoded to both allow and, indeed, force us to ask an en-
tirely new set of questions about literature and the literary record” (Jockers
2013,4).
Therearesomeveryfundamentalepistemologicalquestionsthatlurkinthe
background of discussions about the analytic side of Digital Humanities that
oughttobelaidbare.Ahuman readercanneverread ordigestalltheinforma-
tion about any topic, and there is consequently always far more data available
than can be used in any one study done by a person. In general, Humanities
scholarsarenotabletolookatmorethanjustasmallamountofwhattheycon-
sider representative documents to provide evidence for their claims and they
must hope that these are able to stand in some meaningful way for the rest of
thesubjectunderstudy.Overtime,thisbottleneckhasbecomesuchanintrinsic
featureofthescholarlylandscapethatsomehowweforgetthatideallywewould
liketolookatmoredocumentsinordertoavoidbuildingvastintellectualedifi-
cesbasedonwhatamountstoanecdotalevidence.Theproblemwith anecdotal
evidence is that it can be cherry-picked from a sea of information to prove or
support avarietyof different points.
Forexample,inwritingabookaboutBuddhism,theauthorofWhattheBud-
dhaTaughthadnecessarily,ina150pagebook,totakeasmallselectionoftexts
and ideas from the corpus of over 15,000 pages that constitutes the full Pāli
canon or Tipiṭaka which the book is intended to represent. Ideally, this is
done through a careful selection of representative examples of the text, but
there is invariably a large amount of personal bias that goes into such a selec-
tion.Within such a large corpus,other passages and ideas could have been se-
lectedthatwouldprovideaverydifferentviewaboutwhattheBuddhataught.In
