The project consists of four phases.

Phase I: Prosopographical and bibliographical database

Implementation of a web application which (a) offers information about Jaina Digambara authors and their works to the scholarly public and (b) provides facilities for philologists to gather and edit this information.

Inspiration: A Study of the Manuscripts of the Woolner Collection, Lahore (FWF Project P20268)

This phase was completed in 2011 and resulted in the site at hand. Authorised users are able to add, edit and relate entries to each other on the basis of bibliographic references. pdf-versions of publications can be stored in a digital archive. All visitors of the site have access to the collected data, excect for the pdf-archive, by using the functions "Browse" and "Search".

Contentwise, the site contains the bibliography of Trikha's dissertation, the names of the primary sources used therein and sporadic prosopographical information about their authors.

Phase II: Searching through TEI-texts

Implementation of an addition to the application, by which xml-texts, structured according to the TEI convention, are integrated into the site.

Model: Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts (SARIT), Sakya Research Centre

Authorized users will be able to upload TEI-texts, which will be added to the archive of the site if they pass consistency checks on a TEI-lite basis. All visitors of the site will have access to these texts, if they are unlocked. Unlocked texts can be downloaded and will be depicted under "Browse" according to the texture of their respective markup (pages, paragraphs, sentences, lexemes, etc.). The TEI-texts will be integrated in the full-text search function of the site; markup that pertains to the categories of the database (names of works, authors, places, etc.) will be integrated in the category-search of the site.

With regard to content, this phase of the project will focus (a) on the basic markup of extexts of the eight extant works of Vidyānandin and (b) on their representation under "Browse". The TEI-texts will then be distributed to the community of Indologists via SARIT and GRETIL.

Phase III: Facilities for the automatic comparision of texts and for the markup of selected categories

Jaina Digambara authors often cite, paraphrase or borrow text passages of other works or re-use passages from their own works. In many cases, the identification of these intertextual elements provides valuable information for the understanding of the composition structure of a work or for the historical relation of the respective authors. Some of these intertextual elements are characterized by a significant degree of literalness and phase III of the project will implement tools to trace and document them.

Inspiration: Göttingen E-Research Text-Re-Use for Digital Edition, Googling the Rishi

Authorized users will be able to trigger unsupervised routines that will break up a TEI-text of the corpus in characters strings that will be compared against a corpus of (non-TEI) etexts. Sample countings revealed that a ratio of, approximately, 3:5 separates significant from insignifcant literal correspondence (60% of the characters of two Sanskrit character strings are identical in sequence, 40% are different). A authorized user will be able to access the correspondences found by the unsupervised routines and will be able to markup them in the TEI-texts of the Digambara corpus. All visitors of the site will be able to access the confirmed correspondences via "Browse" and "Search".

Contentwise, this phase of the project will focus on the evaluation of literal correspondences in Vidyānandin's works with passsages in the works, for which extexts are provided by GRETIL. In addition, etexts of the works of Akalaṅka and Prabhācandra will be structured on a TEI-lite basis.

Phase IV: Systematic markup of selected philosophical terms

Authorized users will be able to markup lexemes, which are used as key terms in Jaina philosophy. All users of the site will be able to access these terms and the text passages of the corpus, where they are attested. This phase of the project will be carried out in cooperation with a project by the L.D. Institute, Ahmedabad (see Participants and Cooperations).