Outrageously expensive scans of basic material for the study of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism:
DPS電子仏教文献データ 『ギャンツェ・テンパンマ・カンギュル写本DVD』 470,000円
DPS電子仏教文献データ 『北京版カンギュルDVD』 370,000円 [prices from Kawachen]
Digital Preservation Society. Tempangma manuscript of the Kangyur. 113 (? out of 114) volumes. PDF files, distributed on DVD. Shinagawa, Tokyo: 2010. US$4,700.00 (Including shipping) [sample]
Digital Preservation Society. Peking Kangyur. 107 volumes. PDF files, distributed on DVD. Shinagawa, Tokyo: 2010. US$3,700.00 (Including shipping) [sample]
Udanavarga MS, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fol.1
With Japan and Europe now putting significant parts their manuscript holdings online — with only beneficial consequences, it seems — let us hope that our friends in China rapidly follow suit.
Kudos to Prof. Wakahara for getting some good photographs of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts out of Bangladesh. So in future reports on these manuscripts there should be no problem with providing full transcriptions of the colophons, including all the information about their Nepalese (and Tibetan, in one case) transmitters and users.
Extreme philology: typed text can be recovered from a reflected image of the writer’s hand motions, even when the writing device itself is in motion and the writing itself is invisible. For example, if you sit at the front of a vehicle and type on a mobile phone, someone at the back of the vehicle can record the reflection in glasses or a window and extract the typed text from the recording. The process is innovative, but its constituent elements are not; it chains digital magnification, image stabilization, difference matting and optical character recognition into a single hair-raising violation of privacy:
Rahul Raguram, Andrew White, Dibyendusekhar Goswami, Fabian Monrose and Jan-Michael Frahm. ‘iSpy: Automatic Reconstruction of Typed Input from Compromising Reflections’. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2011. [author’s site / PDF]
From the Abstract
Using footage captured in realistic environments (e.g., on a bus), we show that we are able to reconstruct fluent translations of recorded data in almost all of the test cases, correcting users’ typing mistakes at the same time. We believe these results highlight the importance of adjusting privacy expectations in response to emerging technologies.
Georg Duffner’s EB Garamond, according to its official website, “is an open source project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century.”
It has true italics, true bold (more like semi-bold), true subscripts and superscripts, true swash caps and true small caps (including true capital ß – see Ralf Herrmann’s crystal-clear presentation on this). There are old style figures, discretionary ligatures, and work-in-progress initials. And in particular, there is coverage of the Unicode Latin Extended Additional codeblock.
This is not only actually all in a free font, but in one that looks pretty good, as the specimen [PDF] shows:
EB Garamond specimen: just... wow.
Although I haven’t given EB Garamond a full tryout yet, I can confirm that it works out of the box in XeTeX, which is probably the tool that can exploit its advantages to the fullest.
A caveat: EB Garamond is work in progress; Cyrillic italics, for example, are clearly provisional at the time of writing, and some outlines were updated as recently as a couple of weeks ago on github. Nonetheless, it will be good enough to set camera-ready copy for many projects as it stands; it is certainly miles ahead of the unspeakable G****** U****** and its ilk. Thankyou, Mr. Duffner.
Indologists still haven’t moved the Devanagari code block much beyond the inadequate ISCII-1988. Meanwhile, Michael Everson’s ill-informed “Newari” (sic) proposal — the only rañjanā-lipi proposal out there — hasn’t gone anywhere since the 1990s. Today, something like the siddham symbol in Unicode 6.0 [test page] has to be found in the Mongolian code block:
Christine McCarthy Madsen. ‘Communities, innovation, and critical mass: understanding the impact of digitization on scholarship in the humanities through the case of Tibetan and Himalayan studies’. D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 2010. 345 pp. [official site / PDF]
From the Abstract
The author presents detailed evidence of how digitization is changing the inputs, practice, and outputs of scholarship in this field, as well as the characteristics of digitization that have led to these changes. Importantly, these findings separate out the success of individual projects from the success of digitization across the field as a whole.
The Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC-TBTS)
Where: Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, Hamburg.
Director: Dr. Dorji Wangchuk.
Established: January 2011.
Focus: “Scholarly investigation of Tibetan (primarily Buddhist) texts”.
URL: http://www.kc-tbts.uni-hamburg.de
Saptavidhānottarapūjā performed by Badrīratna Vajrācārya, 1957 CEA slew of photographs taken by the late anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–1995) have been placed in an online digital archive hosted by SOAS. Hundreds of these photographs are purposive records of Newar life, taken just after the opening of Nepal to foreign visitors in the late 1950s. Shown here is a worship of Āryatārā performed in Kathmandu by Badrīratna Vajrācārya who, although a well-known figure in Kathmandu, is not identified by name in the archive.
Dozens of other Himalayan and South Asian ethnic groups are represented in the collection, which is a real mine of information for researchers in the field, well worth the cost of digitization. The copyrights — yes, they still matter — are reserved by SOAS and Nicholas Haimendorf.
