Encoding for Endangered Tibetan Texts
Linda E. Patrik · Digital humanities quarterly · 2007
For over a thousand years, Tibet has preserved and translated ancient Buddhist Sutras from India, keeping the tradition of Buddhist philosophy and meditation alive long after it died out in India by the 12th Century. Recent efforts to digitize materials from this textual tradition offer opportunities to broaden the circulation of rare materials to the exiled Tibetan scholarly community, but also suggest conceptual challenges arising from the complexity of the texts and their inherently multimodal character. This paper describes the scholarly and meditative traditions from which these texts come, and discusses possible approaches to their digitization.