Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR)

15 January 2016

Photo: ITLR

The ITLR is designed to serve as a digital platform for researchers from the fields of classical Indology, Tibetology, and Buddhology when dealing with Sanskrit/Indic-Tibetan lexical items; and as a long-term basis for collaboration among scholars worldwide from these related fields. The ITLR is thus primarily a digital treasury of reliable and comprehensive Indo-Tibetan lexical data that have been put at the disposal of the broad scholarly community interested in Indian and Tibetan texts and thought. The ITLR will accumulate and store lexical items that are the products (or by-products) of research done within the framework of selected projects devoted to the investigation of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist literature of all genres and the by-products of research of individual scholars, which under normal circumstances would otherwise often end up tucked away in scholarly footnotes and thus remain largely inaccessible.

One of the long-term aims of the ITLR is to provide the necessary infrastructure for collaborative research and other forms of cooperation between scholars from the fields of Indology, Tibetology, and Buddhology, and between traditional and modern academics as well.

Which areas will be covered?

Although lexical items from the various branches of Buddhist philosophy are bound to be in the majority, the entries will not be restricted to Buddhist terminology, but will also include other Indian religio-philosophical terms, and indeed any lexical items and names that occur in the texts. In keeping with the vision of the ITLR to leave the number of entries open-ended lexical items from all fields of knowledge and literary genres will be incorporated. It is envisaged that lexical items from a whole host of fields and sub-fields will flow into the ITLR via multiple channels.

Who is involved?

The aim of the ITLR is to bring together Sanskritists, Buddhologists (with knowledge of Sanskrit or classical Tibetan), classical Tibetologists (with main research interests in Indo-Tibetan and Buddhist materials), and specialists in Digital Humanities. Fortunately, a number of colleagues from several universities and other institutions have already agreed to cooperate, either on an institutional or individual level. Beside scholars from the University of Hamburg, these include scholars from the International Institute for Digital Humanities (DHII) in Tokyo, University of Tokyo, University of Kyoto, University of Naples, Mie University, University of Oxford, Koyasan University, Nishogakusya University, Minobusan University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leiden University, Renmin University of China, Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente in Rome and the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing. Further potential partners are being sounded out. Scholars who are interested to contribute to the ITLR are welcome to contact us.

History

The ITLR is the first project initiated by Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk (immediately after he assumed his position at the Department for Indian and Tibetan Studies at the University of Hamburg). The first ITLR workshop, “Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR): Conception, Development, Implementation,” took place in Hamburg December 16–17, 2009. The second workshop, “Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR): “TEI Encoding for Classical Asian Texts,” took place July 12–14, 2010. A third workshop, “Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR): Experimentation and Implementation I,” is scheduled to take place in Hamburg July 19–22, 2011, and a fourth, “Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR): Experimentation and Implementation II,” in Tokyo in December 2011. We have been fortunate to gain support for the development of the ITLR database from the International Institute for Digital Humanities (DHII), Tokyo, and from the SAT [Saṃgaṇikīkṛtam Taiśotripiṭakam] Daizōkyō Text Database, Tokyo. Since 2010 meetings, each comprising members of the ITLR team in Hamburg, Mr. Kiyonori Nagasaki (general manager, DHII), and Dr. Toru Tomabechi (DHII), have regularly taken place (May 2010; October 2010; February 2011; May 2011), in which concrete steps towards the development and improvement of the ITLR database were agreed and followed up on. (For more details, see Cooperations).

ITLR-Viewer

Cooperating Institutions: