Re: [Indic-texts] Jaina-Prosopography

Dear Dominik, We discussed the issues privately a year ago and we took many of your extremely useful suggestions on board. As highlighted in the articles, the triplestore data of the JP will be made available free to use by anyone once the download functions and webpage are installed. I wish this was the case all around especially in India where Jaina electronic datasets are as difficult to access as the Jaisalmer bhandar. The most interesting answer I received so far to the standard question as to the long term viability of databases (for the JP guaranteed by Sheffield DHI) was the one of GabrieI Bodard at Senate House. I think he is right in saying that the only procedure that preserved texts in the past and will preserve electronic data over time is copying. No super database or web-portal will ever emerge and be able to survive over time (maybe apart from the internet itself). Building in options for linking purpose built datasets at the point of development therefore seems to be the way to go. The data mining software Gabriel developed is limited to the standard categories of name, date, place etc. 'Stage two' prosopographies' however require uniform data and often highly differentiated taxononomies for specific purposes and require a great deal of case specific analysis. Given permissions (!) it may be possible relatively easily to produce a dataset of datasets through copying. But the emerging datasets will not be uniform and hence require massive work to be useful for stage two prosopographies. I can presently not see how this can be handled without hands on editorship. Since eternal editor roles are inconceivable some kind of standard will have to emerge. Solving the conundrum of finding a standard for coding Indian family names for library catalogues proved tricky and has been abandoned as far as I can see. In the articles I laid out the practical and theoretical issues we faced as a memento of self-reflection but also in view of informing (potential) collaborators on this specific project. I found Keats-Rohan's book by far the most useful source for practical research with such tools. She did not touch upon South Asian materials though. On the addition problem how to operationalise patronage I didn't find much useful information but I may have missed something. TEI has no useful categories. Off the shelf does not always work for particular research questions as well. Clearly at least in South Asian Studies most work still lies ahead. We need datasets comparable to the projects on the Roman materials of Mommsen etc. (which are still not digitally available, certainly not in state two prosopographical format). Pandit is fabulous but did not provide the tools for instigating the research questions informing the JP project. Otherwise I would have indeed simply requested Yigal to permit putting data in and computing them as suggested by you. I am not aware of a sociologically oriented stage-two prosopography in South Asian studies at present and cannot be sure whether in a limited way the JP will succeed realising this aim. It also is a pilot study. But its data can be copied ad we learn quite a lot about the structure of the Jaina data in the process of analysis. Sigh... Peter On 16 May 2018 at 18:54, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

Dear Peter,

Can I suggest in the strongest terms that the Jaina prosopography project uses the Pandit http://panditproject.org prosopography system for managing its data? Many of us are interested in the same kinds of question, and it is critically important that we share data. If we all go off in corners and re-invent the wheel, we will set back our field by decades.

Pandit isn't perfect. It may not even meet all your needs, although I suspect you will be surprised by how much it does do for a project such as yours. However, Yigal and the team who created and maintain Pandit are actively developing it and they are very open to technical suggestions (and money!). I am in such a dialogue myself right now, with one of their system programmers who lives in Brazil.

It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of creating a sound tool for serious prosopographical work. Pandit is itself the third iteration of the project. It started as a Windows-based Filemaker Pro project. That became unusable after a certain volume of data was added. Then it was ported to MySQL running on a Linux base. That was more robust, but also had drawbacks due to leftover features from the earlier Windows mess. Finally, Yigal had the whole thing rewritten again in the light of everything we had learned and ported the very considerable volume of data forward to the new system. Since then, even more author/work/manuscript data and bibliographical material has been added.

Looking at your Jaina prosopography paper, all the "methodological issues" you raise in sections 3 and the onomastic issues in section 4 were faced and mostly solved by the Philobiblon http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/philobiblon/ project, many years ago, in the context of Iberian prosopography. A major part of that thinking informs Pandit.

The basic fact is that systems such as this become exponentially more useful as more data is added. What you add links to what has been added before. New relationships are discovered, time is saved by not entering the same data repeatedly and this, in turn, leads to a major gain in accuracy. (A public genealogical system that demonstrates this kind of crowdsourced cooperation-gain superbly is geni.com.)

If you decide not to put your project's data in Pandit, then I hope you will produce a compelling document explaining why not. It will be very useful to the Pandit team for their own future consideration.

Best, Dominik

​ -- Professor Dominik Wujastyk http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk ​,​

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity ​,​

Department of History and Classics http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/ ​,​ University of Alberta, Canada ​.​

South Asia at the U of A:

​sas.ualberta.ca​ ​​

On 16 May 2018 at 03:19, Peter Flugel wrote:

...

Dear Friends,

I have just joined the list on recommendation. I haven't seen any of the earlier communications as yet, but as an opener would like to inform you of a the above mentioned project and of the attached probing articles that emerged from in its context:

(2018) 'Jaina-Prosopography I: Sociology of Jaina-Names.' In: Balbir, Nalini and Flügel, Peter, (eds.), *Jaina Studies. Select Papers Presented in the 'Jaina Studies' Section at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference.* Delhi: Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan & D.K. Publishers & Distributors, pp. 187-267. (Proceedings of the World Sanskrit Conference) https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/24708/

(2018) 'Jaina-Prosopography II: “Patronage” in Jaina Epigraphic and Manuscript Catalogues.' In: Chojnacki, Christine and Leclère, Basile, (eds.), *Gift of Knowledge: Patterns of Patronage in Jainism.*Bangalore: National Institute of Prakrit Research Shravanabelagola, pp. 1-46. (in press)

On the project: https://www.soas.ac.uk/jaina-prosopography/

Since the main purpose of the project is to create a tool to be used by the research community beyond the lifetime of the project any input leading to an improvement of the approach would be more than welcome.

The database will be accessible by the beginning of 2020.

with best wishes

Peter

-- Dr Peter Flügel Chair, Centre of Jaina Studies Department of History, Religions and Philosophies School of Oriental and African Studies University of London Thornhaugh Street Russell Square London WC1H OXG

Tel.: (+44-20) 7898 4776 E-mail: pf8@soas.ac.uk http://www.soas.ac.uk/jainastudies

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-- Dr Peter Flügel Chair, Centre of Jaina Studies Department of History, Religions and Philosophies School of Oriental and African Studies University of London Thornhaugh Street Russell Square London WC1H OXG Tel.: (+44-20) 7898 4776 E-mail: pf8@soas.ac.uk http://www.soas.ac.uk/jainastudies