Machine-readable version of the Mahabharata and Prof. Daniel Ingalls

[Adheesh Sathaye]

Dear George et al,

I imagine the Tokunaga/Smith electronic version of the MBH (http://bombay.indology.info/mahabharata/statement.html 
) is sufficient for most basic scholarly purposes? it contains many of  
the supplementary ("starred")passages, though not all of the variant  
readings, I believe.

There was some controversy during its editing at BORI which others on  
the list might be better equipped to discuss. But as of now, this e- 
text is freely available. The Critical Edition itself is still under  
copyright in India, and BORI still actively sells copies--so I would  
strongly advise against scanning a graphic version without seeking  
permission.

All best wishes,

Adheesh





----
Adheesh Sathaye
Department of Asian Studies
University of British Columbia

On May 20, 2009, at 6:45 PM, George Hart wrote:

> I just received the following note from Dan Ingalls, Jr., the son of  
> Prof. Ingalls.
>
>> I recently transcribed a tape of a talk my father and I gave (a  
>> quarter of a century ago ;-), and got interested again in the topic  
>> of producing a machine-readable version of the Mahabharata.  We  
>> dropped the project back in 1980 because it seemed like a lot of  
>> work, and it wasn't clear that it made more sense to pay for  
>> technology than to pay real people who needed jobs to do the work.
>>
>> However I still have an unbound copy of the Bandarkar edition, I  
>> know some people at Google who might be willing to do the scanning  
>> (I don't know this for sure), and on todays machines the processing  
>> would not be a huge amount of work.  I think my modest Macintosh  
>> could probably do a page a second.
>>
>> My question to you is this:  Has this already been done, by hand or  
>> otherwise and, if not, is it still something that would be of  
>> value? A side-effect of reviving the project would be to dust off  
>> my tools and make them available to other workers in the field. My  
>> programs were all written in my own language (Smalltalk) that only  
>> ran on special hardware at the time, but there is now an open- 
>> source version that runs on just about every computer and operating  
>> system.
>
> I am posting this (with Dan's permission) for comments.  My own  
> feeling is that if Dan has an unbound copy, he could run it through  
> a scanning machine and make available a graphic version -- surely  
> the BORS edition of the MBh is one of the great achievements of 20th  
> century scholarship in any field.  I don't know whether it is still  
> under copyright.  As far as scanning it goes, I think the wiggly  
> lines under many words would pose a problem -- and it would be  
> almost impossible to scan the apparatus criticus, which is of course  
> a vital part of the work.  But with Dan's fluency in smalltalk,  
> perhaps these issues could be overcome.
>
> For anyone interested in seeing Prof. Ingalls giving a lecture in  
> 1980 on this project, see
>
> http://vimeo.com/4714623
>
> George Hart
>