Bichitra: The Making Of An Online Tagore Variorum (quantitative Methods In The Humanities And Social Sciences)
by Sukanta Chaudhuri /
2016 / English / PDF
10.6 MB Download
This book documents the creation of the Bichitra Online
Tagore Variorum, a publicly accessible database of
Rabindranath Tagore's complete works in Bengali and English
totaling some 140,000 pages of primary material. Chapters cover
innovative aspects of the site, all replicable in other projects:
a hyperbibliography; a search engine and hyperconcordance working
across the database; and a unique collation program comparing
variant texts at three levels. There are also chapters on the
special problems of processing manuscripts, and on planning the
website. Early chapters take readers through the history of the
project, an overview of Tagore’s works, and the Bengali writing
system with the challenges of adapting it to electronic form.
This book documents the creation of the Bichitra Online
Tagore Variorum, a publicly accessible database of
Rabindranath Tagore's complete works in Bengali and English
totaling some 140,000 pages of primary material. Chapters cover
innovative aspects of the site, all replicable in other projects:
a hyperbibliography; a search engine and hyperconcordance working
across the database; and a unique collation program comparing
variant texts at three levels. There are also chapters on the
special problems of processing manuscripts, and on planning the
website. Early chapters take readers through the history of the
project, an overview of Tagore’s works, and the Bengali writing
system with the challenges of adapting it to electronic form.
The name Bichitra, meaning "various" in Bengali, alludes
both to the great variety of Tagore’s works and to their various
stages of composition. Beyond their literary excellence, they are
notable for their sheer quantity, the number of variant forms of
a great many items, and their afterlife in translation, often the
poet’s own. Seldom if ever has the same writer revised his
material and recast it across genres on such a scale. Tagore
won the Nobel Prize in 1913.
The name Bichitra, meaning "various" in Bengali, alludes
both to the great variety of Tagore’s works and to their various
stages of composition. Beyond their literary excellence, they are
notable for their sheer quantity, the number of variant forms of
a great many items, and their afterlife in translation, often the
poet’s own. Seldom if ever has the same writer revised his
material and recast it across genres on such a scale. Tagore
won the Nobel Prize in 1913.
By its value-added presentation of this range of material,
Bichitra can be a model for future databases covering an author’s
complete works or other major corpus of texts. It offers
vastly expanded access to Tagore’s writings, and enables
new kinds of research including computational text analysis.
The “book of the website” shows in technical and human terms how
researchers with interests in art, literature and technology
can collaborate on cultural informatics projects.
By its value-added presentation of this range of material,
Bichitra can be a model for future databases covering an author’s
complete works or other major corpus of texts. It offers
vastly expanded access to Tagore’s writings, and enables
new kinds of research including computational text analysis.
The “book of the website” shows in technical and human terms how
researchers with interests in art, literature and technology
can collaborate on cultural informatics projects.
