www.thdl.org
University of Virginia
PO Box 400126
Department of Religious Studies
Charlottesville, VA 22904
(434) 924-3021
Project Director:
David Germano
dfg9ww@gmail.com
Project Manager:
Dan Haig
ddh4u@d.mail.virginia.edu
Project Technical Director:
Nathaniel Garson
ndg8f@Virginia.EDU
Project Associate Director:
Kurtis Schaeffer
ks6bb@Virginia.EDU
Project Field Coordinator:
Liu Ying
Foreign Students Department
Tibet University
Lhasa, Tibet
Autonomous Region, 850000 China;
(86-891) 634-0943.
Dollar Allocation Year 1: $196,000
Project Overview:
We are systematically developing content holdings of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (www.thdl.org, THDL) with support of multiple projects that access, collect, organize, preserve, and disseminate information on the world region of Tibet and the Himalayas extending across five nations and many cultural, linguistic and environmental zones. We are focusing on a significant expansion of holdings across multiple disciplines and media, while focusing on the documentation of places to integrate these archives. Its projects include a broad set of activities providing both intellectual access and direct access to classical literature, Web sites, scholarship, audio-video recordings, images, maps, people, organizations, and historical periods.
TICFIA-funded activity is providing key technical, planning and digitization support for a variety of projects and submissions with their own funding, such that THDL’s model facilitates a tremendous synergy among collaborators across the nation. TICFIA-funded staff are continuing to refine and develop THDL's technical infrastructure including its full migration into the FEDORA digital library system, and further develop the Toolbox initiative, a set of tools, guidelines and training modules intended to empower individual scholars to prepare materials on their own desktops to enable smooth incorporation into THDL's permanent digital library. THDL is digitizing large amounts of place-based information –Gazetteers, ethnographies, maps, census records, environmental data sets, historical records - and utilizing the resultant Gazetteer records as means to integrate all THDL collections (images, texts, a-v, etc.) by place IDs. The provision of standards-based tools and repositories to multiple projects extends the digital revolution to many institutions, and ensure that their scholarship persists in the long term with wide dissemination. Thus multiple funding streams and effort from many scholars are being facilitated and integrated by the TICFIA-funded centralized infrastructure, training and support. The end result will be a quite comprehensive digital library on Tibet and the Himalayas fully integrated on the basis of places.
The fundamental basis of our project is to preserve and facilitate access to foreign information resources in print and electronic forms pertaining to Tibet and the Himalayas via a centralized set of repositories. This includes editions of classical/modern literature and modern scholarship; images, audio-video recordings, and maps; and specialized reference materials including gazetteer, bibliographies, dictionaries, timelines and much else. All of these are processed and stored according to humanities computing standards, while access is ensured with diverse presentational formats allowing for flexible browsing, presentation, and searching. The system will allow for any textual resource to be transformed into a PDF for easy printing. It will thus both integrate and make more accessible specialized scholarship across multiple disciplines, and render accessible an entirely new generation of media and quantitative resources.
Need for Project
The need for the project’s services involve the need for knowledge about this vast and important region it; the need for a sophisticated multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary digital library initiative stimulating, integrating, and disseminating resources and scholarship from/about the region; and the importance of building broad archives of information about places therein. There is an urgent necessity for a collaborative project consolidating, integrating and building resources on Tibet and the Himalayas due to the poorly understood nature of one of the most central areas of Asia fragmented across national boundaries.
The geographic focus of this project constitutes one of the most significant and largest areas in the entire Euro-Asian continent, situated across a vast expanse between the cultural poles of India and China. Despite the considerable cultural, historical, linguistic and political importance of this region, and its status as the lynchpin between South and East Asia, it has received comparatively little holistic attention. The academic rift across the Himalayas – between Sinology and Tibetology in the north and Nepal Studies and Indology in the south – has hampered genuine scholarly understanding of the region. Our project will deconstruct these traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries by allowing researchers, students, the government and the public to access multimedia and textual resources on the area as a whole, thus fostering new and exciting possibilities for comparative research.
Additional issues that make the digital library model of particularly compelling importance in less commonly taught area studies are the generally poor curricular resources for teaching these languages, the impoverished state of basic reference resources necessary for translation, and the scarcity of competent users of the languages in the US. There is a compelling need for systematic resources on Tibetan and Himalayan places, regions and institutions as a resource in and of itself, and as a means for integrating other scholarly resources. The region is dominated by diversity – environmental, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic – such that even specialized scholars have a hard time comprehending the local diversity while seeing it as part of a larger regional picture. While our scholarly approaches are dominated by fragmentation into disciplines, there is a great degree of continuity in our object of study based upon criteria space, time and agents. By building up a powerful integrated set of repositories on places – from minute to vast in extent and importance – THDL will provide integrated mechanisms to bind together all the disciplinary research that it is generating, archiving and indexing on place-based criteria. This in turn will further promote and facilitate scholarly development of interdisciplinary projects on specific places, resulting in a dramatic improvement in our understanding of the region as an array of highly specific and highly diverse regions and points with striking patterns of continuity and discontinuity.
Project Significance and Impact
The significance of the project lay in THDL’s aim to provide a dramatic expansion of extent, quality and types of knowledge about Tibet and the Himalayas from contemporary and historical vantage points; to innovatively integrate resources and scholarship on the area across regions, institutions, nations, and disciplines through an innovative area-studies based digital library infrastructure; and to systematically develop resources on Tibetan and Himalayan places, regions, and institutions in extraordinary granularity as well as in broad regional patterns, which is also used to geo-index all relevant media and scholarly collections of data. Also, this will provide a compelling area studies model for the use of technology to facilitate interdisciplinary, transregional, collaborative, and flexible -in-access approaches to the creation and dissemination of scholarly resources for a given region.
The proposed project contributes to the development and advancement of theory, knowledge and practices in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies by promoting interdisciplinary approaches, active student learning, collaborative knowledge generation, and transregional approaches. The most important contributions in practices will be the promotion of collaborative teamwork across disciplinary, institutional and national boundaries in the humanities and social sciences in particular, which are currently dominated by the paradigm of individual and disciplinary-bound scholarship. In terms of theory and practice, the initiative will promote innovative forms of knowledge: interdisciplinary convergences; geographical considerations in analyzing cultural and environmental phenomena in their regional distribution, transregional context and local forms (using GIS temporal-spatial databases); the importance of human-environmental interaction; the use of non-textual media to convey information not easily represented by textual data; and the use of broad scale regional quantitative data in conjunction with interpretive analysis (via databases giving integrated access to census, environmental and other national data). These constitute major shifts in our daily practice as scholars, and in the long term will affect theoretical shifts in our scholarship across multiple subjects and disciplines. The level of collaborative knowledge content will increase, new avenues will open for the publication of both granular and extensive publications not served by traditional forums, and the form of knowledge itself will evolve. Databases will also make broad regional data - census, environmental data and so forth - easily accessible to the public at large and scholars. We will disseminate both the data and scholarship and the process, systems and tools built to facilitate and house that data. Thus the content and system will be rendered accessible in ways sure to have transformative effects. The resource allows dissemination in an integrated manner of texts, databases, maps, images, audio-video, immersive objects, and other formats, thereby supporting different modes of access corresponding to different modes of learning and understanding.
Project Design and Applications
The project’s activities constitute a coherent and sustained program of research and development in the field in (1) the overall design of a comprehensive area-studies digital library, (2) the place-based integration of all collections, (3) broad digitization and cataloging goals, (4) specific projects, (5) general ongoing support, and (6) technical tasks. THDL provides an integrated environment for digital publication of diverse projects with decentralized administration of scholars from diverse universities unified by an integrated technology.
A digital library consists of integrated technological infrastructure and tools, collections of content ranging over diverse disciplines and media, and a community of producers, publishers/archivers, teachers and users. THDL is adapting UVa's powerful FEDORA digital library infrastructure technically and intellectually to stimulate, integrate and disseminate interdisciplinary and collaborative initiatives on the area in multiple languages and frameworks. With past TICFIA support, UVa has established the technical, logistical and political infrastructure for an exemplary model of a digital library devoted to international collaboration and dissemination of interdisciplinary research on a global area.
Our present project is to harness these achievements towards a four year program of dramatic expansion of content through the means of multiple projects, and a particular focus on places. The integration of all collections based on places along with a major expansion of data and scholarship on places is based upon a gazetteer with basic descriptive information about places, including latitude/longitude. IDs from this gazetteer are used to geo-index every other collection of data and scholarship throughout THDL. The gazetteer will provide a comprehensive guide to alternative names, latitude/longitude, feature type, and basic descriptions, with everything bibliographically sourced and time stamped. The Gazetteer can be searched by flexible criteria, or browsed via hierarchical lists. The Gazetteer IDs are used as a service to index all other media collections so that users can automatically assemble all resources relating to a place. The Gazetteer is being integrated with GIS datasets including administrative, environmental and census data, such that users can visualize that place's location in conjunction with a range of GIS layers, while the Encyclopedia of Places holds more detailed essays on places. There are complex visualizations integrating satellite images, maps, images, audio-video, and 3D models of architecture and landscapes, which can be accessed from the Gazetteer or from an easy to manipulate cartographic interface starting from a contemporary political map of Asia.
Crucial to this proposal is our broad digitization and cataloging goals to establish base data beyond specific projects. We will focus on standardizing encoding and markup of Tibetan electronic texts; the cross-referenced cataloging of the Kangyur-Tengyur, one of the three most important Buddhist scriptural collections in the world; the completed cataloging of our collection of over 35,000 images and several thousand audio-video recordings; and creation of Gazetteer entries for all relevant contemporary administrative units across the five nations, a large body of select historical sites and regions, and the full set of Tibetan monasteries.
Specific projects are the lifeblood of THDL, as individuals and institutions use THDL repositories to create unique projects with individual components as registered objects within THDL repositories. These projects rely heavily upon UVa staff for technical guidance, support, and processing, while they otherwise provide their own funding. General ongoing support throughout all areas of THDL will be sustained as staff support general submissions in terms of processing, technical support, and technical developments in areas that we have robust repositories and functional systems for processing and dissemination. These include a multimedia journal, community rosters, language instructional units, image collections, audiovideo collections, open source tools and fonts, work on disciplinary collections, bibliographies, dictionaries, and timelines.
We have a huge number of collaborators who rely upon UVa for support, and it results in a massive influx of independently funded data. Technical tasks remain as we develop and integrate tools and repositories, perfect the Scholar's Toolbox to create an assembly line from private hard drives to long term digital library collections, and complete the assimilation of THDL into the FEDORA digital library system. Our infrastructure is custom built in accordance with standards and best practices of humanities computing and released on an open source, free basis; they are flexible, capable of integration, multilingual, and suited to the needs of area studies collaboration. FEDORA will integrate all of these services and date for permanent storage and access. THDL's centralized technical initiatives solve this problem for the field to allow funds at distributed centers to be focused on content, while insulating scholars from exposure to underlying technology, enabling them to generate and edit resources with user-friendly templates, and ensuring the product will be integrated and consistent (see Other Materials-Technical Specifications).