Všeobecné zrcadlo digitální Asie

The Buddhist Canons Research Database is a resource that offers complete bibliographic information (with internal crosslinks and links to external resources) for the roughly 5,000 texts contained in the Tibetan Buddhist canon, and offers both general and targeted full text search access to those texts (approximately 15 million syllables).

BCRD is a joint project of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies (AIBS) and the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies (CCBS).

The Buddhist Canons Research Database was first developed as a private reference tool in 1994 as a loose combination of existing bibliographies and reference resources. In 1999, a custom search-and-retrieval search engine was built specifically for Tibetan language data, incorporating fuzzy-matching, stemming, and part-of-speech identification in support of corpus-based linguistic research for Tibetan.

In 2010, the basic bibliographic database was first deployed (as a public beta) as an online resource to enable the research community to document and track editions and translations of texts in the Buddhist canon — beginning with Tibetan canonical works collected in the Kangyur (bka 'gyur) and Tengyur (bstan 'gyur). Designed to facilitate research in canonical materials, related texts in the two halves of the canon and in the bibliography of secondary literature in world languages were cross-linked to allow for rapid accessing of information, including direct links to page images (hosted by TBRC) and e-text (hosted by ACIP) as well as documentation and links to parallel e-texts in Sanskrit and Chinese.

In 2011, in an attempt to support the larger goal of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies (AIBS) of promoting translation and research in Buddhist Studies worldwide, the interface to the database was redesigned for localization in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Tibetan, Japanese, and Chinese). In addition, as one of the key strengths of the Tibetan literature lies in its thousand year commentarial tradition on the Buddhist canon, select authors and textual collections were added to the database as well, providing direct links to Tibetan-authored commentaries on canonical works. This remains an ongoing augmentation of the research database.

In 2013, the BCRD was formally launched with a redesigned interface, and full-text searching of the Kangyur and Tengyur — either as a whole or specifically within an individual text — was added, complete with page-by-page reference information and links to available e-text (again hosted by ACIP) and partial lexical information automatically provided through the use of techniques of Natural Language Processing. This, too, remains an ongoing development of the database. A detailed presentation of the latest features was given by Paul Hackett at the Thirteenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS-XIII), Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, July 2013, and at the "Humanities Studies in the Digital Age and the Role of Buddhist Studies" conference at the University of Tōkyō, November, 2013.

OpenPecha is an etext and annotations store made available on GitHub and through a set of APIs.

The project’s primary aim is to facilitate the collection, proofreading, and enrichment of etexts by leveraging language technology and collaboration.

Visualizations of the Journey to the West

by DongMyong Lee, Barbara Wall

Our primary aim is to  provide analysis, anecdote and new perspectives on Southeast Asia on issues ranging from politics and international relations, modern history, religion, culture, ecology, economy, language, and migration, all based on regional expertise and local sources (fieldwork, oral history, archives, local media, etc.).

The goal of the Southeast Asia Platform is also to establish a network of cooperation between experts across various regional and disciplinary fields of expertise. Countries of Mainland Southeast Asia like Myanmar or Vietnam, are often studied separately from the nations of Insular Southeast Asia such as Indonesia and the Philippines. We aim to bridge these conceptual and disciplinary boundaries (as well as the state-centered analysis) that prevent the sharing of research results and restrict opportunities for establishing broader theoretical debates.

The platform organizes thematic conferences and workshops in cooperation with scholars and experts from Czech research institutes and universities as well as academic institutions across Europe and other parts of the world. The Platform for Southeast Asian Studies will also be represented through regular scholarly seminars in Prague on themes relevant to Southeast Asia (the  Southeast Asia Lecture Series ), where invited experts present their most recent research findings from the region.

The platform plans to launch a regular blog on Southeast Asian affairs that will provide short topical analytical pieces and comments on the studied region, called New Monsoon, monsoon winds representing a key climatic phenomenon, which facilitated trade and cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean basin and southwestern Pacific.

From a long-term perspective, our goal is to contribute to the consolidation of the tradition of Southeast Asian studies at Czech academic institutions and serve as a   Prague Southeast Asian Platform that will collect and share top research findings on the region as well as provide a networking umbrella for all relevant activities. In line with that, we seek to enhance our joint capacity to network with other prestigious research institutions in Central Europe, the wider European context, and elsewhere across the globe.

Activities associated with the platform will build on the long-standing commitment to collaboration that already exists between the Oriental Institute researchers and academics from the Institute for International Relations in Prague, the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts (the Institute of Asian Studies) of Charles University, together with Palacký University in Olomouc, the University of Vienna, the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of Passau, etc.