Posted on by I. Sin.

New resources for East Asian Buddhist Studies at DDBC

Dharma Drum Buddhist College is developing a number of projects in digital textual studies, all making use of TEI. The simultaneous presentation of digitized text with corresponding data, whether it be a scanned image of the original or something else, is one of the technologies being pioneered. When coupled with markup that allows for automatic search and indexing, the benefits are plain to see.

Here’s an example (but first note that the following unnanounced items are to some extent experimental):

Archive of Buddhist Temple Gazetteers (中國佛寺志): http://dev.ddbc.edu.tw/fosizhi/ui.html

A similar project is a fledgling concordance of published translations, both English and German, with the Chinese source material. Apart from what is there now, which is already an achievement in itself, with a little imagination, one can see where they are going with this. And it is an interesting place:

Archive of Translations from the Buddhist Canon: http://dev.ddbc.edu.tw/han2e/ui.html*

Dharma Drum are also creating or digitizing specialized glossaries for Buddhist studies. Currently they have three available in Unicode, either in XML (from which almost any format could be generated) or StarDict format:

These guys are doing pioneering work; the digital material they present is entirely legal; they strive, “as a matter of principle, to support Open Software and Open Standards.” I have no hesitation about mentioning them here. (Thanks to 馬 德偉 for the tip.)

* Translations digitized and collated so far:


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