Digital Humanities and Buddhism: An Introduction. Volume 1 PDF
Preview Digital Humanities and Buddhism: An Introduction. Volume 1
Digital 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
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