The last talk in this session for today is on benefits of tools and applications for a digitized analysis of Chinese Buddhist inscriptions.
And this concerns actually the research project Buddhist Stone Scriptures in China,
hosted at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities,
which is devoted to the documentation of holy Buddhist scriptures that were carved onto rocks,
boulders and stones from the sixth to the eighth century in China.
The digital processing and presentation of these stone carved texts offer some remarkable benefits.
For today's presentation, I will briefly introduce three of the main advantages,
namely the facilitation of the workflow of transcribing and editing the texts to establish the corpus of carved stone sutras,
the transparency of this editing process and the incorporation of spatial relations for an advanced analysis of the material.
So for the first point, the workflow.
Traditionally, pre-modern Chinese texts engraved on durable materials like metal or stone,
were first copied by brushing a moistened sheet of paper into the cavities of the carved surface
and applying black ink on all outstanding parts, leaving the traces of the chisel in white on the paper.
These transportable rubbings were collected from the 18th century on by Chinese epigraphers,
who studied their ancient scripts and transcribed them for further publication.
However, the rubbings are in no way a faithful copy of what was originally written into stone.
The very process of taking them already involves a reading and interpretation of the stone cut characters,
especially of those that are less well preserved.
To avoid such flaws and shortcomings of the traditional Chinese procedure of text documentation,
our project relies solely on the carved text to provide the lemmas for the corpus of stone sutras.
The original stone is documented either by photographs alone or by both scans and photographs.
Then it is collated with several text witnesses, including different versions of rubbings
and different versions of the text, extant either in manuscripts or printed editions of the Buddhist Canon,
as well as the digital edition of the Buddhist Canon, edited by the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Tax Association.
As a result, the original stone text can be transcribed by reconstructing lost or damaged characters
and can be discussed in text-critical annotations.
The basis for the transcription process is the documentation of the original stone,
which is done ideally by 3D laser scans.
After processing, the inscriptions can be viewed either in 2D or 3D view
by means of an applet developed for the project by the Itrai Mainz, the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz.
This applet was already implemented in the workflow of reading and transcribing the text in modern Unicode characters,
but it's going to be also available online.
So now I would like to show you a very short movie how this applet works.
This applet provides various options for a better legibility of the carved characters,
like adjusting the light position that you see here or adjusting the so-called water level.
The use of this digital tool, of course, exceeds by far the possibilities of traditional print media,
and it can further empower users to better comprehend the editing process and continue research by themselves.
This leads me back to my second point, the transparency of the editing process.
Digital research and publication can help to make the editing process more transparent and replicable.
Our web application documents each inscription on five levels by providing first a scan or photograph of the original stone,
second one or several paper rubbings of the stone,
third a transcription in Unicode characters reflecting the original layout of characters in vertical columns on the stone,
fourth a transcription in Unicode characters with modern punctuation and reading direction in horizontal lines from left to right,
and fifth an English translation of the text including text critical annotations.
In this way, text editing is significantly enhanced in terms of correctness as well as transparency,
since the user can follow the transcribing of each stone character step by step.
Another main challenge of the addition of the medieval stone sutras is their transcription in modern Unicode characters,
because many of the ancient carved texts use glyphs not yet encoded in the Unicode standard.
Also, more Chinese ideographs are being added currently to the UNIHAN database.
The problems of mapping ancient glyphs to Unicode characters are complex and cannot be solved completely by encoding ever more glyphs.
This selection of characters may give you an impression of the range of possible variations of glyphs with the same semantic meaning.
In many cases, it is a matter of the exact number of brush strokes or of the position or contours of a certain stroke.
But sometimes the carved character looks rather different from the unified one when you take the character in the lower left corner, for example.
To cope with these problems, we programmed and implemented a snippet tool that is able to search and line up images associated with a certain Unicode character.
As you can see here, the image of a rubbing of a certain stone inscription is overlaid with the characters transcribed in Unicode.
The user may click on any of these characters and start a search for the same character in all other inscriptions contained in the database.
The search result provides him with image snippets from other rubbings and thus presents a variety of writing styles for the searched character.
This tool has also proven useful for the detection of misreadings when a wrong Unicode character was assigned to a poorly preserved stone-cut character.
The snippet tool can therefore help to check on transcriptions to either validate or reassess a certain character.
My last point for today, the spatial relations.
It is very important to understand that the inscription sites within their particular topographical context because the choice of site is of religious significance and in first particular ritual uses.
For this reason, the project has generated 3D models of larger inscription sites right from the start.
At first, we made use of these models to provide map-like views of the general layout of inscriptions at particular sites.
Here is one example of a giant steely that was carved with a base, body and head on the rock bed.
The model shows where the main steely text and the associated color phones are located.
At another site, the stone inscriptions were distributed along a pilgrim's path.
Thanks to a flash animation, the user can follow the path uphill and read the carved text segments on the stones and in translation.
This, of course, is only a screenshot, no flash animation.
Since interspatial relations between multiple sites are also of interest in the project, all inscriptions and sites were GIS documented and can be addressed on interactive maps.
Here is the ground plan of the largest inscription site in Sichuan province, Wofo Yuan, overlaid on Google Earth.
Thanks to another cooperation project with the Institute of Geography of Heidelberg University, even more tools for a GIS-based analysis have been developed to clarify the spatial history of the creation of inscription sites and related spreading of Buddhist sutras, as well as the migration movements of the monks responsible for it.
For the Sichuan inscription sites, which host sutra texts inside of caves, the visualization with 3D models has become even more rewarding.
The user can find the inscription site on a map, zoom in, select a particular cave and, by means of a panoramic view, approach the inscriptions inside the digital cave and read them by means of high-resolution photographs.
In this respect, digital space is not only a synthesis of traditional documentation with robins, photographs and printing, but offers a new level of close-to-reality documentation.
Yet, closeness to reality is only one side of the coin. The other side can be new methodological approaches resulting from intensive engagement with the visualized stone sutras.
In the case of a particular cave at the Woffo-Yen inscription site, Cave 33, a careful analysis of the distribution and arrangement of text passages selected from various sutras has helped to clarify this cave's text program in the same way as art historians would expect images to be arranged according to an iconographic program.
By contents, the carved text passages are grouped into merits attainable for laypersons and merits attainable for monks to the left and right of the central sutra of the teachings left by the Buddha that regulates the life of the Buddha's disciples after his entering Parinirvana.
In this example, the visualization of the text's spatial relations has added to the clarification of the site's religious significance.
In a more traditional approach, the implications for the text's spatial relations may have gone unnoticed.
For a closer look at the Buddhist stone scriptures in Shandong province, you may visit our site, stone sutras org, and please log in as editor-editor.
And the stone sutras carved in the caves in Sichuan province, they're still under construction, so I don't know if they're working right now. Thank you for your attention.