Welcome to the OCHS Manuscript Database Project

Until now, manuscript collections and primary sources to religion in South Asia have not been easily accessible to scholars and students and are little known to the general public. With our OCHS Manuscript Database Project, we wish to contribute to a new development in Digital Humanities and Hindu Studies with an open-access database, providing a new user interface for browsing and interacting with primary research materials as well as transliterations and translations in different languages. These are works produced by various religious traditions of South Asia and covering a wide range of subjects and genres, but with a current focus on Śākta and tantric traditions and Vaiṣṇavism in the modern period.

This database will in time comprise many thousand primary sources in Sanskrit, Newari, Bengali, Tamil, Tibetan and other classical and medieval South Asian languages, produced within a time-span of one and a half millennium. They are written in a large variety of scripts and on many different writing materials, such as paper, palm leaf, and birch bark.

Features

The OCHS database will offer new workflows for use of computational tools in Hindu Studies, including

• the possibility to automatically generate books and formatted HTMLs, PDF, or Word files with customised content of specific manuscripts (e.g., choosing to include the original Sanskrit, transliteration, and translation in language of choice)
• easily perform textual analysis and concordance (e.g., count and compare the frequency of specific words or phrases across manuscripts, including identifying parallel passages)
• automated transliteration (OCR) of hand-written manuscripts

In addition, the OCHS database offers a more advanced interface allowing users to

• see transliterated and translated texts side-by-side with images of the original manuscripts, and download specific views of text data in structured form (e.g., CSV)
• overlay text on top of the manuscript image to compare (e.g., transliteration or translation with the original Sanskrit text)
• add comments or suggest corrections for text or image material