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
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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