The Chan Database Project

The Asia Institute presents a Numata Colloquium Series Talk by Professor Christoph Anderl on the recently initiated Chán Database Project.

The lecture will give a concise introduction to the recently initiated Chán Database Project which tries to approach the rich corpus of Chinese Chán texts with a concerted effort by specialists in a variety of fields. The complex corpus of Chán texts consists of a variety of textual materials –ranging from D?nhuáng manuscripts of the Táng period to various printed materials of the Sòng, Míng and later periods. Each type of text and genre poses specific problems to the researcher and the CDP tries to develop adequate analytical tools in order to meet these challenges. The overall aim of the project is to publish and analyze Chinese Chán texts and make them accessible to other researchers and the general public. A central issue of the project is the development of a set of digital tools which enable a useful web-based publication of the corpus, linking the manuscripts and print facsimiles with collated editions and sets of analytical modules. Through the user-friendly publication and application of different analytical modules the textual materials can be approached and analyzed ("marked-up") in a variety of ways. The development of these technical platforms and tools will not only be of importance for sinological, buddhological and linguistic studies but will hopefully also have a more general significance concerning the digitization and analysis of historical texts. In addition to giving a short general outline of the project specific examples concerning the presentation and analysis of manuscripts and printed texts will be provided in the lecture.

***

Professor Christoph Anderl
Institute of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley and Stanford University