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RESOURCE > Release of an updated Beta Version of the ITLR – Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (September 19, 2017)
by Orna Almogi
We are pleased to announce the release
of an updated online Beta version of the Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR)—a
collaborative lexical project.
The ITLR database is accessible at http://www.itlr.net (click on “Viewer (Beta version)”; for search help look under “Users’
Guidelines”).
The ITLR, planned as a digital platform
for researchers from the fields of classical Indology, Tibetology, and
Buddhology, is not conceived as a dictionary or encyclopedia, but is rather
envisioned as a digital reservoir, which will be developed over a longer period
of time with the aim of accumulating and storing varied information on a
wide-range of Indo-Tibetan lexical items, and thus becoming a digital treasury
of reliable Indo-Tibetan lexical data that will serve the broad scholarly
community interested in Indian and Tibetan texts and thought.
The database is built around Sanskrit
headwords which are ordered as (1) words/terms/phrases, (2) names of places,
(3) names of persons, and (4) titles of scriptures/treatises. It provides
attested Tibetan translations of these lexical items, occurrences of them in
primary sources, modern renderings, and references to them in discussions in
academic works. The entries, having an accumulative nature, do not attempt to
be “complete” and are meant to be supplemented and updated in the course of
time. More details on the project—including its goals, scholars,
projects, and institutions involved, and its history—are found at www.itlr.net, under “Aims & Salient Features”.
The Beta version currently includes over
1200 entries from various areas of Indo-Tibetan literature—including a number
of Tantric terms as well as words transmitted in traditional lexicography,
alongside terms from Abhidharma, Logic, and other fields of Buddhist
philosophy.
The database will be updated regularly
in terms of both content—including the addition of new information to already
published entries as well as the publication of new entries—and technology.
Currently the ITLR database provides the contents only via the Web interface.
We are, however, preparing for sharing the contents in the form of TEI and
Linked Data, which will be published in the future.
New releases and updates of the ITLR
database in terms of contents and technology will be announced regularly.
The core collaborating institutions are
the Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC-TBTS) at the
Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Universität Hamburg, the
International Institute of Digital Humanities (DHII), Tokyo, and SAT Daizōkyō
Text Database at the Digital Humanities Initiative, Center for Evolving
Humanities, Graduate School of the Humanities and Sociology, The University of
Tokyo. Further collaborating institutions are The University of Tsukuba (International
Education and Research Laboratory Program for Indian and Tibetan Studies,
Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences (ICR)) and Mie
University (The Vikramaśīla Project). The project also involves editors and
contributors from other institutions, including the Austrian Academy of
Sciences (Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia), Pune
University (Department of Pali), University of Naples, Oxford University,
Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, Rome, Mahidol University, Bangkok,
Kyoto University, Komazawa University, Dongguk University, Seoul.
Orna Almogi
