 Yeah, hello, my name is Adrian, and I'm a PhD student here at SOAS, and I will tell you today mostly about certain aspects of the text that is the main focus of my thesis, this Sita Charit by Ramchand Balak, a so-called new Jane Ramayana in Brajsparsha, quote-unquote new, because it's not really new at all. It was written in the mid-17th century, according to the text itself, 1658. But unfortunately, it sort of slipped out of history at some point in the 19th century, and hasn't really been, has never been printed, never been available outside the manuscript format, and it's only very rarely been referenced in scientific literature or scholarly literature or any kind of literature since then. So a major part of my thesis is to produce a critical edition of this text so that it can be brought into discussion again. So I will tell you mostly about the Sita Charit, as I perceive it, but I will also talk a little bit about another question, and that is the question of Brajsparsha. So when I've been going around talking about this work on in-conferences and other instances, there are always two questions that arise. The first one is, of course, a Jane Ramayana. I did not know such a thing existed, but of course it does. But the other question that is perhaps more intriguing to me is the question, oh, did Jains use Brajsparsha, which is not something that is always talked about, though, of course, they did. And I want to talk also a little bit about why is that so that we do not necessarily see these Brajsparsha texts, this Brajsparsha corpus that Jains really did produce. So to begin with, I'll just talk a little bit about what Brajsparsha is. Brajsparsha, of course, is the knuckle of the language that arose in this so-called Brajbumi that you see around the indicated there, the Brindavan-Mathura area, at least in the early 16th century, as a regional dialect of this. All right, thank you, Jains' point. I'll do that, I'll do that. But of course, in the preceding, in the following centuries, the popularity and influence of Brajsparsha vastly increased. So we can talk of perhaps a Brajsparsha literary culture that blasted the war into the 19th century, where if you would use a vernacular language for literary purposes in North India, almost regardless of sect, you would use either Brajsparsha or Persian, of course, if you wanted this text to have a broad influence, roughly corresponding to the area I pointed out here. But of course, when we talk about Brajsparsha, there are certain images that come to mind immediately. Iconic images of Vaisalavan, Bhakti poets like this Surdas, of course, perhaps even more iconic Mirabai, which is, of course, broadly famous, and especially in connection to both poets, the image of Krishna, the flute playing young cowherder boy and adolescent in the Brajspumi. But still, Jains also produced Brajsparsha. And of course, the most famous example is Banarsidas, the 17th century merchant of Ardakatanaqa fame, of course, one of the only full autobiographies in pre-modern South Asia, and fantastically interesting text, and of course, also his commentary on Kunda Kunda, the collective order, which are both influential and important texts. And of course, other Jain poets in Brajsparsha existed and have been worked on, but still we are only scraping the surface of what is there, and especially when it comes to the genre of narrative, of big epic narratives in the same sense as Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas, the avadi retelling of Ramayana. These are less familiar to us. And when I started canvassing my thesis, I came into it as primarily a student of early modern North Indian literature, and then I came across this quote in the history of Hindi literature on the Sito Charit, and this really, of course, made me curious about what this text could be like. And of course, also knowing that this is not the only epic of its kind produced by a Jain in Brajsparsha. So many kinds of questions came to my mind, such as who is this Ramchand Bala who wrote this, what can we know about him, is there even possible to know of anything, perhaps more importantly, why is it that this Sito Charit is said to be significant, and yet there is hardly any knowledge about what it actually contains in the modern era? Is it really significant? Maybe it isn't, maybe it's received knowledge. And anyway, why is it so obscure? Why is it that a text can be thought of as being significant and important and all these things? And still, it has never been printed. It's never been accessed in modern days. So I started by looking at manuscripts around India, and this is just the selections of the manuscripts I found. So these are spots that indicate not a single manuscript, but they indicate sites that are even accessed, either accessed or that are sourced manuscripts from, where there were multiple complete manuscripts of the text. And these manuscripts come in different kinds of shapes. They look different, and they spread from the earliest one I found was from AD 711, and the earliest one is the most recent one. It's from the mid 19th century. So given that the text was composed in the mid 17th century, we have a provenance of this text's popularity across great parts of Central and Western India before it then faded into relative obscurity. So what we can say about it, looking at what is in it, is of course, on a very factual basis, about 2,500 verses long, corresponding to roughly 200 pages in manuscripts, which is quite a bit, it is a long work. In terms of religious outlook, Balak is very clearly a Degambara. He speaks very passionately about the beauties of Degambara Jainism. He is also aligned with the broader Adyatmic movement that Banasidas is seen as one of the main inaugurators of, in that he deeply values wisdom, insights and the transformative power of this kind of insight. On the other hand, he is also very preoccupied with bhakti, bhakti towards the teachings of Jainism and also bhakti towards those individuals who have successfully managed to live by the teachings of Jainism. I've not talked so much about the religious aspect or the Jain aspect as such here, but more about what I perceive to be a very original narrative structure in this work and also a very original or at least thought-breaking form in terms of aesthetics. So this badly formatted Devanagari is sadly courtesy of PowerPoints. There's nothing I can do to help it. So please imagine the short ease properly aligned. But in terms of narrative structure, this is the first actual narrative segment in the text that actually mentions what is happening goes beyond benedictions. And you see that it basically tells the Ramayana. So it begins with what is already there and begins then at the ending with Sita and Ram returning back to Ayodhya after the actual fact. And then it goes into a detailing of how various kinds of slanders start arising amongst the populace of Ayodhya and how Ram eventually determines that the only way forward is to, of course, sit as a punishment or bandhas to which he and tasks a commander in the army to say, take her to the forest and tell her that she's going to say, going for Pujain in Jemandir and then drop her off. And of course, when they arrive in the forest, Sita responds to this situation with a show of great stoicism and with a great faith in the importance of not abandoning dharma. And it makes the case that the commander should not feel sad about what he is doing. Why they should not blame Rama? This is all the effect of a crude karma. And so she gives a speech that culminates with what is sort of a an encapsulant of what she sees to be the so-called good nature of the sati, of the devout, chained, laywoman. To which the commander returns, very impressed, back to court and relates the story that is heard to Ram, who is then most dejected and very sad. From there, the story, of course, follows the birth of the two twins of Sita and follows them into adolescence, where they meet Narada, the sage, who references Rama to them, mentions him, and they don't know about their lineage. So they ask a raptured, please tell us more. And then Narada begins telling everything that's happened so far. And then he tells the Ramayana to the boys. And he tells the Ramayana, then, that is very focused on what individual characters in the story are doing. It focuses on how characters like Bharata and Ravana, how they handle situations where the the doctrines of Jainism, the laws and rules of how one should lead a Jain life, clashes with the dilemmas. They find themselves in. At the end, the story returns to the narrative presence of the story with Narada telling the story to the boys. It's over. And then they move back into the present story, present tense of the story, where Ram finally meets the two boys, Laban and Kursha. They have a big reconciliation and recognition scene. Sita, of course, rejects following back into Ayodhya, but rather takes renunciation. Ram asks her before he leaves this final question, are you angry with me? And then Sita gets the last comment in the actual narrative in this very quote worthy encapsulation of of what is Jeena Dharmabhyasa. So this narrative structure, of course, we heard Eva talk yesterday about the Jain reminders. And of course, there is a tendency to see them, of course, as these stories, these Puranic stories about how Ram and other characters figure into the larger cosmological framework of the Trisha Shalaka, Purusha Tray and all of these things. But in the Sita chariot, then it is all reconfigured and refocused so that we see the story of the Ramayana through the lens of the prison of Sita as the paradigmatic Jain. Character. She is the benchmark that all of the characters in the story are judged against and it finishes in a hymn of praise to the asceticism of Sita. So this is a striking narrative structure that is also similar to what is called the Satikata version genre of stories. Stories about Satis of devout Jain laywomen and their provenance. Here is an example of 19th century manuscripts. I believe it is 19th century, I found in Jaipur, the Sita Patrisi, which also does exactly the same thing. It tells only the story of Sita's Van Maas and drops the rest of the Ramayana and only focuses on her response to that situation. So the Sita chariot is similar, except that, of course, it includes the entire Ramayana as a subplot to the major plots of Sita in the forest. At the same time, it also has the Sita chariot, a striking style, I'd say. It has, as you maybe have seen already in the quotes I've given to you, it's a colloquial tone that is quite endearing and quite fascinating. This is a good example, of course, when Lavnan Kursha leave for war and they tell Sita Mata Jihamsha, which is, of course, not something you see very often in ornate, metrical poetry from the 17th century, these kinds of almost modern sounding phrases. And this is the aspect that I've had the most feedback on when I've shown aspect elements or the samples from this text at seminars around the world. A similar example is, of course, this initial response from Sita when she's dropped off in the forest with a wonderful phrase, It's a Vannamekeakam, I have a Georgian name here, Kajokahatumaram, which has the sort of clipped phrasing of actual speech, right? But that doesn't mean that it's not on it or that other things were not available to the poet. You see, this is a sample when Mandodari, Ramana's wife, tells him that he is currently blinded by his passions for Sita in this beautiful imagery of, you are like a lion that sees its reflection in the well and in its furious anger doesn't see the full picture, which is, I think, beautiful and striking, but still also captured in this quite straightforward language. Normally, we only see this kind of straightforward colloquial language in Brajparsha in prose texts, but the Sita chart is not a prose text at all. As you see here, this is the first page of one of its manuscripts, and you see, I've indicated all the metrical changes, and this is only the first page. In comparison, here are two other early modern Ramayana stories. On the left, you have the Sita Ramchapa in early Gujarati by the Svetambara Samaisunga. This is, of course, an extreme example, but you see that it follows the same metrical pattern throughout in this random sample. And on the other hand, you have Ramchandrika by the courtly poet Keshavdas, who is, of course, famous for perhaps being the courtly poet of Keshavdas, of Brajparsha, an aesthetic genre or formant, which values the pyrotechnics of advanced metrical usage. And you see how often he changes between meters in telling a quite straightforward story from the Ramayana. So the Sita Charit is closer to this than to this in its structure, in its metrical complexity. Yet at the same time, this Riti poetry is also typically full of heavily adorned Kavya, Alankaras, and very complex aesthetics, which then the Sita Charit, as we have seen, doesn't really use. So what we can say about it, then, is that I see that it contains a very creative refocusing of a familial narrative. And it also has a high degree of metrical variation. And while at the same time, I'm using this unadorned language for its effect, which places it in a sort of slightly unexplored space in the broader context of early modern North Indian literary culture, where you often think in terms of Bhakti poetry, and which is songs and hymns and quite straightforward. And at the other hand, you have this advanced quarterly poetry. This is a bit of both, right? So the other question I wanted to then bring up a bit is, why is a text like this so obscure? Right? Why has it never been printed? Why has it not been available? And when I went out looking for manuscripts, of course, I found a lot of different texts in a similar way, also in Brajsparsha, also written in the 17th and 18th century, that for the most part, I have not been able to find printed editions. So I find, and this is not a kind of accusatory exercise, but I just want to point to two wider narratives that I think often guide the way we approach Brajsparsha in literary culture. And of course, on the one hand, it's this all-pervasive influence of the Vaishnava impression and the so-called on the Bhakti movement. In this narrative, of course, Bhakti in North India really, really took off with the rise of devotional Krishna poetry in Brajsparsha. And of course, with time, this has seeped into the wider project of nationalist historiography, I'd say, in that it is proto-Indian nationalism and it is proto-Hindi and it is a proto-modern Hindu identity. And within this narrative, of course, the kind of Riti poetry, the kind of courtly aesthetics that Kershadas, for instance, stood for, is seen as a kind of decline as aestheticism gone berserk, right? And of course, within this scheme, there is, first of all, not so much space to recognize the influence of Persian Sufi romances on the narrative writing of this period. And of course, there is very little space for Jains, right? So that is one narrative to be aware of. Thanks. And the other aspect or the other question is, of course, the idea of Brajsparsha or vernacular in general, as a kind of lesser language when I say lesser, I mean, as we see in this quote by the fantastic study of Jain Romainus by Kulkarni, where at some point he also lists some of the more recent early modern texts and suggests that they probably do not contain any new remarkable features, but repeat in their own language. What the older Jain writers have already said, of course, in Sanskrit or Prakrit. But at the same time, we all know that the secret of a good story is not so much the actual content, but it's how you tell it, right? So it's not necessarily, even though it might be a translation or it might be a retelling, it might be something else going on at the same time. And Brighton Hawley worked thoroughly on the body of poetry by the Bhakti poet Surdas, where they found that the effect of that poetry, its aesthetic effect, its devotional effect, its brilliance in other way, doesn't come from the fact that he's introducing the team of Krishna to an audience that never heard about it before. It becomes, it is because he references these teams that are familiar to them already, and it does so in highly ingenious ways. For instance, in one of his poems, where he referenced the story where one of these, is it a cloud demon that comes in, while Krishna, the son, the baby boy, is playing, and of course he ends with just the picture of a cloud coming in over the courtyard, and then everybody is free to reference the story that they know is coming, but the image stays, and that's the important thing in that kind of poetry. Similarly, to mention something more local, London, in of course the same period, in the early modern period, where you had the first production of Hamlet here on stage, recent Shakespeare scholarship has emphasised that prior to Shakespeare's Hamlet, his own company had already produced two different versions of the Hamlet already, so the complexity of Shakespeare's Hamlet is of course then partly stemming from the fact that he could count on absolutely everybody who came to see it, that they already knew the story. And I think it is along similar lines that we should approach this early modern narrative literature, and I think that is also a way to see the actual real and substantial impact of Jane Brunch-Marsha literature to the wider literatures of early modern North India or South Asia in general. So I'll end with that, and I'll just bring on this message from Ramzan Balak, and that was it. Thank you. Yes, I'm going to talk about a total different matter. It's more about hope the change is not too cold, because after this nice stories, I'm going to talk about digital texts. The topic of my talk is a bundle of programmes. Sorry, this one is, I have to stop this from running. Can you help me with that? How do I stop this, stop it from going forward, yeah? You want to stop it on this frame? Yes, just on the box. OK, sorry about that. The topic of my talk is a bundle of programmes, a website, which is publicly accessible at the internet location, depile.org. Under this address, I maintain two websites which pertain to the indelogical research areas, history of Indian philosophy, and China studies. The word depile in the internet address is an acronym for the common title of the two sites, which reads, Digambara Philosophers in the Age of Logic. The title reflects an influential prioritisation of K.K. Dixit, who in 1971 coined the phrase, Age of Logic, for the literary epoch, beginning with the Tatvata Sutra, and ending with Yajovicaya. What Dixit had in mind with the phrase was the error of the production of the China Sanskrit literature on doctrine, ontology, epistemology, logic, and emancipation. The first site gathers historical information on this epoch, its authors, the works, lifetimes, social relations, and the locations of their activity. The second site is dedicated to the every of one of these authors, the 10th Centre, Digambara Vidyanandin. I have already presented the bibliographical site here at the SOAS, and will present today the digital corpus only. In my presentation, I will first demonstrate the search function of the site. I will then outline some criteria to assess the quality of digital resources. And before the backdrop of these criteria, I will finally look at the current stage of the development of the corpus. So that's the next 20 minutes. Several works have been ascribed to ancient China Achadias by the name of Vidyanandin. There is a scholarly consensus that these nine Sanskrit works are the extant works of a single person of the 10th century, of the common era. These works have often been described to represent the culmination of classic China philosophy. In them, the author enlarged upon ideas and arguments of Samantabhadra and Akalanka, and engaged in a detailed debate with proponents of other traditions of Indian thought. It is worthwhile to know for historians of Indian philosophy or of China thought if a particular term, phrase, or argument appears in these works. In their entirety, these works are quite voluminous. They add up to 1,000 pages in the editions I use. Electronic versions of these editions can now be searched in the following way. You have here a screenshot of the site. To the left is the main content. To the right, the navigation menu. This particular list of works is found under the main navigation item works. Searches can be entered after clicking the link search, or by directly entering a term in the quick navigation field to the upper right. As a first example, I enter the infrequent word Guha in the quick navigation field. By clicking on the search icon, the program searches, and arranges the result like this. The first block repeats the input of the search. The second block contains a short summary of the results. That is, the number of occurrences. We have five in this example. The unique matches here, Guha and Guha, and the sigler of the works where the matches occur. Here, the Astu Sahasri, the Sratya Shasana Pariksha, and the Tatva Autashloka Vatika. The second line of this block gives information on how the results are displayed and ordered, here in form of a so-called concordancer in which the unique matches are given as headers, followed by page and line references within the work indicated by the siglum. Sorry, it has one missing right. Anyway, the page and line references are to the left here. And the context in which the match appears. You will have noted that the search input was Guha, but the found unique matches are Guha and Guha. This is an optional feature of the program in which some Sunday variations and autographic variations are also searched. These options are useful if the number of results is small. For example, if the occurrences of the names Samantha Badra are searched. Here, five unique matches are procured. Two of them include autographic variation for the nasal before dental tenures. The matches with the final vowel long A in the search expression emerged due to a Praschlishta Sandi. Final O comes as a coincidental extra for another Praschlishta Sandi, not for the Sandi us before us becomes O. Another optional feature is the disregarding of spaces in the search expression. The program operates on electronic text in which the transliterated Sanskrit text is not standardized with regard to the segmentation of syntactic elements. The program catches this by looking for matches with and without spaces. A search for Tata Hibudi will thus procure matches with and without space between Tata and him. For exact searches, the standard setting needs to be deactivated. A search for Vadam, for example, procures too many matches in the standard setting. By deactivating the options, a meaningful result is achieved. Speaking of too many results with the display option counter, the results are just listed according to the number of occurrence. With the display option index, the results are listed only with the references without the context. As a final feature of the demonstration, I want to refer your attention to searches within a certain range of characters. In the standard setting, a search for Nanuiti will yield no result. This behavior can be changed by modifying the standard options and allow for a range. That is, an interval of arbitrary characters between the elements in the input field. If range is set, the search for procured text, which is contained by the respective terms, with searches like this, quoted elements can be identified like the colored instances here. This is useful, but the example also shows the limitations of this approach. The string nonverm is not the element we are looking for, and the string it and vt is not the quotitive. A human reader can identify this, but the program needs to be told by a markup of the distinction and the source file. Here the challenges begin. What for that matter are the textal sources for this program, and to what extent is the procured text reliable? I will answer these questions after short characteristics of digital resources to which I come now. I have mentioned in passing earlier that the demonstrated program relies on electronic versions of editions. Two decades ago, the name e-text was introduced for such digital copies. With the digital humanities meanwhile being an established academic discipline, a more distinct notion is in place, especially if one attempts to produce and maintain good electronic versions of ancient texts. I call the copies and questions digital text resources and transformations of digital text resources. What is a digital text resource? What its transformation? Contrary to a digital image resource, a digital text resource can be operated by a machine. More precisely, in a digital text resource, the text of a particular attestation of a work can be extracted from surrounding meta text without further ado. Compare this excerpt from an edition of the Uptimimosa with this excerpt from an electronic text of the same edition kept in the retail text repository. We know that we can open the retail text file in a Word editor and search for textal bits, whereas with the PDF file, we cannot do so. The fundamental criterion for a digital text resource is such the operationality of the text by an electronic program. This criterion can get into conflict with the criterion readability for humans. Gadja Daralal's edition was optimized for readers of the Banagheri to take in the text without effort. A reader who is not used to a transliterated Sanskrit may even find a simple digital text resource like this annoying. Readability gets a prominent issue before the backdrop of another criterion for the quality of a digital resource, digital text resource, namely the separation of text and meta text. The elements highlighted here are meta text and needs to go away when the mere text is to be extracted. Today's standard for a need separation is XML markup, an excerpt of a digital text resource with the first verse of the abdomen master looks like this. Whatever the necessities for operationality by machines, such resources need to be transformed in order to make them readable for humans again. A further criterion is the quality of the capture. That is, the quality of the text with regard to the captured source. Such a criterion applies also to digital image resources. This digital capture is better than this. The former is better in the sense that the later is a bit blurred. Similarly, one text resource can contain more typing errors than another. Quality of the capture translates here to reliable input of the actual source. With this criterion, we are, however, entering the realm of addition proper. Will I repeat every misprint of the captured printed addition, or will I correct errors silently for the sake of operationality by the machine? Certainly not. This is exactly why the e-text got a bad ring to its name. All text with the nodes were erased in order to facilitate the search of the text. But technology has advanced and strategies to document variations of the text of a work are a decisive criterion for the quality of an up-to-date digital text resource. The documentation of variants is a form of annotation or enrichment of the digital resource. The kind of enrichment depends on the interest of the compiler. For example, many of you will be familiar with the digital corpus of Sanskrit, which operates on XML files that are extensively tagged with markup pertaining to Sanskrit word firms. The criterion for quality with regard to enriched text resources is the application of a consistent vocabulary for the meta-textual elements. All idiosyncratic meta-text terminology is not sustainable in the long term. The de facto standard for consistent markup infillology today are the conventions of the text encoding initiative. Very great, very prominent in Britain. The TEI consortium offers a fully differentiated vocabulary for the description of various textual features. Of special interest for my project are the TEI guidelines for default text structure, critical apparatus, or names, dates, and peoples. The best practice example I know of in the field of digital and geology for the strict adherence to TEI conventions is the SARIT project. SARIT is expressively dedicated to the production of digital editions of Indic text. The project is especially noteworthy with regard to the clear identification of individual textual resources, their collection in a corpus, and the documentation of the responsibility for revisions. I summarize the outlined criteria. If one is assembling digital text resources in a corpus, decisions made with regards to these criteria are frequently subject to consideration and reconsideration. The resources are to be operated by a program but which technologies are to be used precisely. Text and meta text are to be neatly separated, but the distinction is not always clear. What about Sunday and Interpretation? Do they belong to the text or do they reflect a decision of the editor like titles and headers and are there for meta text? The quality of the captured text may be satisfactory for one particular artist station, but what about the other artist stations of a work? When do manuscripts come into play? Compliance to the TEI convention is fine, but this convention is not the last word on every aspect of textual analysis. I cannot elaborate on this now. In my remaining time, I will roughly sketch the current stage of development of the Yanandins corpus before the background of the outlined criteria. I get back to the questions left answered earlier, left unanswered earlier. What are the sources for the demonstrated search program and to what extent is the procured text reliable? The sources for the search program are seven digital resource files in which text and meta text are stored alongside each other. One of them looks like this. With a bundle of technologies, these individual resource files are transformed in basically two ways. In the first type, the resource is purged from all meta text and the plain text is fed to the search routine. To the human eye, such plain text looks like this. In the second type of transformation, the meta text is used to render the text of the captured edition together with its editorial features. Such a transformation looks like this. This is the beginning of the text and the nodes are displayed like this. The reliability of the rendered text and of the text procured in the search program depends on the following factors. The quality of the captured edition, measured by an overall impression of the consistency of the text, the quality of the capture, measured by conformity to the captured edition, the number of revisions and the flawlessness of the programs gives for transformation. In the case of the corpus of the Dianandens works, the situation looks like this. The addition captured for the astra sahasri and the satyashasana pariksha are good. The others are often flawed. For the apta pariksha vestika and for the pramana pariksha are better editions available than those that were initially captured. For most work, the capture, okay. For most work, the capture was satisfactory in the sense that the text was entered by people that could read the vernagari but did not understand Sanskrit. This focus on mere copying was distorted for the satyashasana pariksha as the corpus was me. Here, the text may give sense, but the text through a resource does not conform to any existing edition of the text. It is for now not clearly indicated in the resource which readings are mine and which are that of Gokulachandra Jain. The methodic approach to correct this is the usage of markup to indicate my deviating readings. I am currently applying this approach in my study of the quotations in the Tatva Arta Shloka Vartika Alankara. In this excerpt from Manohalal's edition, for example, you find the readings Mataviam and Bahaspatiadi. I think the readings Mataviam and Bahaspatiadi are better and mark the text accordingly in the resource file. In the transformation of the resource, the text can be rendered according to the desired perspective, either in the original attestation or in the corrected version. This is approach and the systematic inclusion of variants from other sources. The digital text resource could eventually become the basis for a new edition of the work. The indication of variants is one kind of markup I use. I employ another kind systematically in order to analyze the dialogic structure of the argumentation. The passages highlighted in green and brown here are elements that signify octavial distance to the conceptual content to which they refer. That is, the text highlighted in red here. The passages in red are thus potential quotations and these passages or the variations may be found in other works of the philosophical literature. The identification of such potential intertextual elements, the analysis and the documentation are the main motives why I'm engaged in the technological method which I presented today. These features will soon be implemented on the site but in closing I want to sum up the functionality in its current stage of development. I recommend the following usage. Search for a term. Note the reference for a passage of interest. Look up the siklion in the list of works and click on the name of the work for an overview of the available sources. This overview contains the bibliographic information for the captured edition, a link to a digital image resource for the captured edition, a link to the digital text resource and links to available transformations. I hope I could steer your interest and thank you very much for your attention. All right, so I wanted to present this, of course, together with Cornelius Kumpelmann, a main collaborator on this project but he asked me to do it myself which is in a way pity because he is more familiar with many aspects of the database. However, I say something about the overall framework and playing around here with the various, good. Okay, so this project has been well advertised in the newsletter and so on. It's, I say a little bit about the background. It emerged basically from the CLUT project which I think most of you are now familiar with and I refrain from reading the abstract which gives a lot of information which is published in the newsletter. And for those of you who are interested in the more general background and questions but here you see one edited page of CLUT's work. It is not extremely well legible but you can see under certain keywords, there are, I mean these are names of people, places, texts, et cetera, but mainly people. You can see a number of historical data with references in secondary literature. I.e. we have here a catalog of catalogs of names and you need in other words to follow the references to the first catalogs and then follow if need be the references in these catalogs which lead you to a certain manuscript library if these things are unpublished and then you have to look at the manuscript if you really want the original historical information. So these are meta search engines if you like of the old 19th century research culture and obviously this was created to facilitate biobiographical research, historical research in JANUS studies and similar work was done in other fields and actually CLUT, of course, was part of the Wilhelmenig Period's mega projects situated in Berlin and the main inspiration may have been the Prosopografia Imperi Romani project by Momsen. That was started as you can see by this application in 1874. CLUT stopped his work, had to stop it, almost completed in 1892. So much of his work was falling into the Post-Momsen project idea and of course the Latin Prosopografia was completed only a few years ago. It took 120 years or so for various reasons, war, interruptions and this and that, but CLUT was a student also of Momsen's. This I think is one of the reasons why one can assume that his Onomasticon was also somewhat influenced by this approach, i.e. transferring approaches, methodological approaches from the study of Greek and Roman classical literature, the history that is embedded in these texts and inscriptions in particular to the field of Jainist studies. The manuscripts arrived in Berlin at the time from India, Jain manuscripts, et cetera, et cetera. So I think although we have no evidence for it, there's good reason for believing that the genealogical approach that CLUT started was based on this paradigm. Now there are a number of prosopographical projects that have built on the peer. Some of them are very famous, I listed them here, you know, in France, here in the UK and many are still ongoing. These are really mega projects. One tries to build up a data collection of all the information that is available to be able to establish cross-links between people, places, texts, et cetera. And as you can see, many of those are now using electronic databases. And the Jain aposapography project is a variant of that. There are a number of projects that use databases in indological studies, or let's say South Asian history studies, Indology as well, a limited field within that. And I just want to highlight why the prosopographical approach is slightly different, the one we chose. Initially it was suggested by Dominic Gugjastik and other people, you know, why don't you put the Jain data which have been published and CLUT, et cetera, and not into Pundit, the web-based database of Jigal Bronner and collaborators now based in Jerusalem. Originally it was based on the Pollock project, which produced 300, 400 entries. However, the database is mainly bibliographical. If you look at it, they imported the Potter bibliographies, et cetera. It doesn't give any information on history, on the contents of the text, let us say. There are a number of other projects that are ongoing. These are all ongoing projects. Chemaltricka's approach is path-breaking. However, it's very interesting if you juxtapose the two approaches, the TEI, the XML approach by looking into the text and disseminating or discriminating between different elements from the prosopographical approach, which is more sociological and less philologically oriented. So you can use digital humanities technology, modern analytical technology for a variety of different aims. Michael Willis here has started wonderful project on inscriptions and I just recently discussed in greater depth with one of the main contributors how the SIDM webpage is supposed to work. Again, a different approach for the study of inscriptions. So there are a variety of existing research projects which are rather big. My talk here can be short and I hope Jay will stop me at 25 minutes past because we have a five minute book launch at the end. I refer you to these texts which give ample information on all the background details and will be available in due course to everyone. Amongst the speakers I disseminated them already. Now what are the tasks of the prosopography? We had to create a data model and a database first and that took up a good part of last year and now data input is our main concern and of course the more data you put in the more links you can investigate between the elements. And later one can present the data, display them in different formats and analyze them with electronic analytical technology just to give you an idea who is working on it. I'm very grateful that recently two new members have volunteered, as you have heard, Samani Pratapaprakya here at SOAS and from Ladnum and Simon Wienand from Ghent University. They're, he's here, will be here for three months and associated individuals from different organizations are mentioned there and there will be more. One of the reasons why I present this here is to really like the old, the other prosopography projects which I indicated before on Greek and Roman materials to call upon collaboration as far as data input is concerned and the use of the database once it's going out of our hands after the end of a three year research period. Then the tool is developed. It will be well stocked with information but the more information people put in and the more use is made of the tools of the webpage base itself, the better. Okay, technical support is from Digital Dementis, Sheffield, if you go to that webpage you will find they have many, many similar projects mostly on European materials such as non-reason in the UK and so on and so forth. They're very fantastic web resources there. Okay, now I, if I click on this, will it? Okay, yes, I have to. And now I'll get on this database. Oops, sorry. Okay, let's hope we are ending up there. Of course not. Cannot download the information, you've guessed it. Let me go straight to the web and put it in here. I mean, this is not yet publicly accessible because there is no web face and display features are not there. And unfortunately we have this rather complicated access code, forgive me for this, but it will all be worthwhile. I have to do that again, but then it will work. Well, this is what I tried to do. I should, now yes, this is what I intended to do and it actually works, great. I mean, on my computer I have it bookmarked. Okay, so this is how it looks like at the moment, very basic, and if we click on this you see here this is most important. I mean, basically here there are bibliographical references hidden under this category. Here that relates to persons and the taxonomies are most important. I mean, here you see the different categories broadly in an overview and you can click on one or other and you see subcategories and to develop them, that was of course the main intellectual task as far as the web, the data model is concerned. So let us, just to, if we want, I mean it's very simple cast. Of course we have a few cast, but there may be more. As you type in a new item, it will automatically be added to the list. Yes, is that legible? Okay. As I said, the display features, which Himal had already in his database, are not yet there, but so you have different types of categories, of course you have the Indian calendars, all these things, different calendars. Difficult is the category of honorifics and epithets, how to distinguish them from binames and nicknames and titles, I mean that really needs, we have established some editorial rules for this. How to classify that is really a matter of interpretation, but many of these things are relatively straightforward, but there are a lot of variations there. Okay, well this is, I mean there are hundreds of different categories and they emerge through the analysis of the materials. Now let me go back and to person. So generic name, there are a number of monks' names, mainly monks' names that have already been put in about a thousand and something already. And if you click on any one, but I think we had one example in particular, I'm not sure we can find this without diacritics, but let us hope so, yes. Ananda Vimal, for instance, this may be one single person. We discriminate strictly according to the data, whatever is presented separately, we simply put in accordingly. So many of the data are hidden, but if you click here on the person features, this mail belongs to the tapagacha, life events, I mean on each category you can click and if you get a full display, I mean this adds up to a whole page. We do that later, probably. I mean here you see the relationships in the data and this is all from one single source of cluts, of course, which is already a meta source. As far as the clut data are concerned, we simply put the clut page in, so it adds one more level to the whole edifice. Sure, so this is one and if you follow the things, you find the references for it and this is really, because we have no display function, it is not so good, but if you put the data in, it's slightly, of course, complicated because of the mass of categories. However, you see here, and the sources are all there, the works, et cetera, I cannot display this on this small screen. One very important are of course the event and role categories, monastic relationships, preceptor, all these things. And the roles, once the data are there, one can, of course, construct lineage diagrams or whatever by analytical software, et cetera, et cetera. I mean just to give you an idea how broadly this structure is and it is a very complex database which can basically link everything with everything. Triple store, it looks mainly at the relationships and I'll give you an example, then it will be easier. So Abhayadeva, I skipped this, but I move to the, well, this is in the clut. I'm an under Vimalar, which we just looked at and you can see the other individuals that are flagged up in this meta source and how they're related, he's a preceptor, et cetera, et cetera. All these links are not in clut. You have to add another level of analytical effort to find out the interrelationships between those. And this is just a tool for historians and to use. So Abhayadeva, again, there may be mistakes as clut nodes and these can be found out by actually looking at the data. We are not merging things, but discriminate as much as possible. So there are 12, no 10 Abhayadevas, the first one is ruled out by clut probably, not an Abhayadeva, but another one, and so on. And how to differentiate between them, there are different historical information in one or other source and you have to interlink all these things. They are published data, remember. The information is already known, but everyone I confronted with the clut or who reported back said, you know, this thing is 150 years old and I found so many things, even in my particular field, which I'm studying for 10 years, which I didn't know yet. Simply by putting information that is out there, scattered all over in the literature together. And this is what such a database can do now much better, of course, than a single librarian, such as clut, an endological librarian. Now, looking at this inscription, which clut actually worked on, that I think makes the use immediately clear. He transliterated the inscription and translated it with a question mark and so there are variants, Sudakar or Suvaka and then he followed up, tried to find out who these people are, et cetera, and you find in clut a number of other entries. So he knows Allah is the father and his wife Singhara. So he has, clut has entries for these, separate entries here, Singhara Di and Allah. And some information is from other sources, outside the inscription here in blue, and they all fit together to produce a composite picture. So if you use the clut itself, the single inscription leads to so many different other keywords and it would take you quite a long time to actually find out even the implications within the clut material of that single inscription, which looks rather trivial, but if you have thousands of those and you know they do exist, many of those medieval have a lot of interesting information about donors and preceptors, monks who did Pratishtar of these items. Then you get an interesting database for historical research. The color forms of text of course are similarly significant and well, this is the outline of the project. The categories are our contribution, the database developed with Sheffield, our contribution, but the data, I hope can be put in by others as well and in the end, data analysis, everyone can do him or herself. There is analytical software out there, of course network visualization or statistics or God knows what, there's a whole catalog and we will have on the webpage a number of those features once it's finished in a couple of years and do a few case studies which illustrate the use in specific historical research of this tool and then we hand it over to you, free to use and I hope we find collaborators. Thank you Peter, we are there. Okay, so I mean we are waiting for the real book to come very soon, but at the moment the book about which we are talking is there only in the form of a PDF and these are the proceedings of the Jane's studies panels which were organized during the World Science with Conferences in Kyoto and Bangkok. So a selection of these papers have been published in this volume and so I don't know if there is another. Yeah, you can see here the paper of contents. Yeah, yeah, share that down. Yeah, yeah. So the papers are organized in three sections, canonical texts, philosophy and literature and history and as you see from the names in the table of contents there are both, let us say, confirmed scholars but also some new people from different countries in the world, especially from Japan who have written in this volume and so we think that, I mean we hope that it will bring interesting contributions on different areas and that's all. But then I don't know, I mean this is, yeah, and the first part of Jane Prosopography is there present with a very long article by Peter. But then I don't know, we are launching a book which does not exist, I mean, which is not there but I understand that there are other books which exist so they also have to be launched, no? They will be launched after lunch. Ah, okay, okay, good. Good, so that's all. Well, thank you very much.