On Wednesday, June 29, at 1:00 p.m. in room 522 of Butler Library, the Digital Humanities Center will be hosting the first in a series of  talks by Columbia researchers illustrating the opportunities that the electronic format provides for creating and working with resources in the history and humanities fields.

 

Our first speaker, Paul Hackett, will be speaking on "The AIBS Comprehensive Kangyur and Tengyur Database." 

 

The presentation introduces the American Institute of Buddhist Studies’ (AIBS) Comprehensive Kangyur and Tengyur Database developed using resources at the ETS/DHC and hosted by CDRS at Columbia University. 

 

This presentation will give a brief overview of design principles and examples of the usage of this database highlighting the depth of annotation and linking available through the use of the site, as well as future directions for its development, exploring and expanding the potential role of “digital libraries” in humanities research.

 

Various catalogues of the Tibetan Buddhist canon have been published over the years, and numerous electronic resources have become available in recent years (such as large-scale image and e-text archives consisting of both primary and secondary materials). All of these resources however, remain scattered and disconnected.  This Buddhist canon database has been designed as a comprehensive central index for all these resources, thereby linking them both together and to additional secondary bibliographic references and primary materials.  

 

About the speaker:  Paul Hackett has a Ph.D. (2008) from Columbia University in Indo-Tibetan Religious Studies.  He also holds a Master of Library Science degree (M.L.S., 2000) from the University of Maryland at College Park where he specialized in digital libraries and presented a thesis on techniques of computational linguistics for cross-language information retrieval.  Dr. Hackett was instrumental in the establishment of the Tharchin Papers and Tibet Mirror Archive at Columbia University; the AIBS Comprehensive Kangyur and Tengyur Database represents his second major contribution to Tibetan and Buddhist Studies resources at Columbia University.