Perspectives of Digital Humanities in the Field of Buddhist Studies
Workshop & Symposium (Hybrid)
12 January & 13–14 January 2023
Buddhist Studies have been inspired by the development of Digital
Humanities over several decades. While some tools reached maturity
about twenty years ago, other tools have been developed very recently
and the future offers even more exciting perspectives. This symposium
brings together pioneers and newcomers of the world of Buddhist
digital humanities in order to give insights into their projects andexperiences. While the event is aimed at promoting a professional
exchange, it also seeks to build a bridge between the developers andthe users of these tools. For this purpose, an accompanying workshop
will consist of introductory units on tools and methods like TACL,
Social Network Analysis, and BuddhaNexus. The symposium-cumworkshop is a joint event by the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies
and the Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship at
Hamburg University.
Registration for the Workshop Part I, II, III and for the Symposium:
Please send an e-mail to Carsten Krause (carsten.krause@unihamburg.de) before 5 January 2023.
More information at: www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de

Venue
Hamburg University

Funded by
Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, Hamburg University
Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship,
Hamburg University

Convenors
Carsten Krause, Sebastian Nehrdich

Speakers
Workshop
Orna Almogi (Hamburg University)
Marcus Bingenheimer (Temple University)
Sebastian Nehrdich (Düsseldorf University, Hamburg University)
Michael Radich (Heidelberg University)

Symposium
Orna Almogi (Hamburg University)
Marcus Bingenheimer (Temple University)
Laurent Van Cutsem (Ghent University)
Christian Faggionato (University of Cambridge)
Oliver Hellwig (Düsseldorf University)
Leo Maximilian Koenig (Hamburg University)
Carsten Krause (Hamburg University)
Charles Li (French National Centre for Scientific Research, EHESS)
Patrick McAllister (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Kiyonori Nagasaki (International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo)
Sebastian Nehrdich (Düsseldorf University, Hamburg University)
Alexander James O’Neill (SOAS, University of London)
Jörg Plassen (Bochum University)
Michael Radich (Heidelberg University)
Élie Roux (Buddhist Digital Resource Center)
Gregory Adam Scott (University of Manchester)
Sven Sellmer (University of Poznań, Düsseldorf University)
Leon Woltermann (Hamburg University)

Workshop, Day 1 (Thursday, 12 January 2023)
Place: Akademischer Senatssaal, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Main Building, 20146 Hamburg
Part I: 9:30–12:30 (including coffee breaks)

17:00–17:30“Using the Historical Social Network of Chinese Buddhism inGephi”
Marcus Bingenheimer(Temple University)

Coffee Break

12:30–14:00
Lunch BreakPart III: 17:30–19:00“TACL: A Tool for the Comparative Large-scale Analysis
of Texts in the Chinese Buddhist Canon”
Michael Radich(Heidelberg University)

Part II: 14:00–17:00 (including coffee breaks)“The BuddhaNexus Platform”
Sebastian Nehrdich(Hamburg University, Düsseldorf University)
Orna Almogi(Hamburg University)_______________________________________________________
The workshops are free of charge. When registering via e-mail (carsten.krause@uni-hamburg.de), before 5 January 2023, please let
us know which parts you are going to attend – offline or online.

Symposium, Day 2 (Friday, 13 January 2023)
Place: Room 121, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, West Wing, 20146 Hamburg
9:15–9:30

11:00–11:30

Introduction

Coffee Break

9:30–10:00

11:30–12:00“Multilingual Semantic Mining for Text Alignment and Parallel
Corpus Building for Buddhist Languages”
Sebastian Nehrdich(Düsseldorf University, Hamburg University)“Tracing the Impact of Buddhist Commentaries from
Silla on Tang Dynasty Huayan: Towards Computerassisted Analyses of Hidden Text Reuse”
Jörg Plassen(Bochum University)

10:00–10:30“BuddhaNexus: Underlying Philosophy, Hitherto Achievements,
Future Plans”
Orna Almogi(Hamburg University)

12:00–12:30“Research Results Achieved by Applying the TACL
Toolkit”
Michael Radich(Heidelberg University)

10:30–11:00“Digital Humanities at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center”
Élie Roux(Buddhist Digital Resource Center)

12:30–14:00
Lunch BreakSymposium, Day 2 (Friday, 13 January 2023)
Place: Room 121, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, West Wing, 20146 Hamburg
14:00–14:30

16:00–16:30“On the Use of Historical Social Network Analysis in the Studyof Chinese Buddhism”
Marcus Bingenheimer(Temple University)“Using n-akṣaras to Model Sanskrit and Sanskritadjacent Texts”
Charles Li(French National Centre for Scientific Research, EHESS)

14:30–15:00

16:30–17:00“Lineages as Network: An Inquiry into the Representation ofdharma Lineages of Chan Buddhism in the Zutang ji 祖堂集”
Laurent Van Cutsem(Ghent University)“Utilization for Digital Images for Buddhist Studies”
Kiyonori Nagasaki(International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo)

15:00–15:30“Cataloguing Chinese Buddhist Publications in the Chinese
Religious Text Authority”
Gregory Adam Scott(University of Manchester)“What Can We Learn from DH Tools and Methods for
Buddhist Studies in the Contemporary Field?”
Carsten Krause
Leo Maximilian Koenig
Leon Woltermann(Hamburg University)

15:30–16:00

18:30

Coffee BreakDinner

17:00–17:30

Symposium, Day 3 (Saturday, 14 January 2023)
Place: Room 121, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, West Wing, 20146 Hamburg

9:15–9:45

11:15–11:45“ChronBMM – Dating Text Corpora Using Bayesian Mixture
Models”
Oliver Hellwig(Düsseldorf University)
Sven Sellmer(University of Poznań, Düsseldorf University)
Sebastian Nehrdich(Düsseldorf University, Hamburg University)“Retro-digital Editions of Sanskrit Texts: Many
Problems, Some Solutions”
Patrick McAllister(Austrian Academy of Sciences)

9:45–10:45“NLP Pipeline for Diachronic Tibetan and Newar Corpus
Analysis”
Alexander James O’Neill(University of London)
Christian Faggionato(University of Cambridge)
10:45–11:15
Coffee Break

11:45–12:15“Data Design for a Navigation System in the Tibetan
Buddhist Canon”
Bruno Lainé(University of Vienna)
12:15–13:00
Closing Discussion at Lunch BreakAbstracts: Workshop
Marcus Bingenheimer(Temple University)“Using the Historical Social Network of Chinese Buddhism
in Gephi”
The first half of the workshop will introduce Gephi. Gephi (gephi.org)
is a popular open source network analysis tool widely used in the
Digital Humanities. (Please download before coming and test it as
the workshop will not cover installation.)In the second half of the workshop we will explore the Historical
Network of Chinese Buddhism with the help of Gephi. The data for
the Historical Network of Chinese Buddhism is at:https://github.com/mbingenheimer/ChineseBuddhism_SNA.
The data contains more than 18K people that appear in Chinese
Buddhist sources and their relationships, spanning the time fromc.150 to c.1900 CE. With it it is now possible to visualize and analyzesocial relationships in Chinese Buddhism from the ego-network levelof an individual, to larger dynamics across generations.
After the workshop attendees will know how to find their way around
Gephi and use the Historical Network of Chinese Buddhism for theirresearch. They will be able to identify persons in the network,
understand how to trace connections back to primary sources,
visualize ego-networks, and enrich the dataset with their own data.

Sebastian Nehrdich(Düsseldorf University, Universität Hamburg)
Orna Almogi(Hamburg University)“The BuddhaNexus Platform”
BuddhaNexus is a database devoted to the study of Buddhist texts
and literary corpora in Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, withparticular emphasis on evolution of scriptures, formation of canons,
and intellectual networks. It offers new ways to study the various
stages in the evolution of a specific scripture, intertextuality between
various scriptures, the linkage between treatises and scriptures,and possible intellectual networks, by locating in the various texts
and textual corpora (approximate) textual matches, be themacknowledged citations, “borrowed” textual passages, or parallel
passages. We will introduce the database and demonstrate its
current abilities by presenting examples for its application on
specific research questions.

Abstracts: Workshop
Michael Radich(Heidelberg University)“TACL: A Tool for the Comparative Large-scale Analysis of
Texts in the Chinese Buddhist Canon”
This session gives a hands-on introduction to a suite of digital tools
for the study of the Chinese Buddhist canon: TACL, which helps
users analyze texts to discover various types of intertextual relations,
including sources, borrowing, and distinctive style. Participation inthis session will be made smoother if participants go tohttps://dazangthings.nz/tacl-gui-one-stop-shop/ before the session,and download the “TACL GUI starter kit”.

Abstracts: Symposium
Sebastian Nehrdich(Düsseldorf University, Hamburg University)“Multilingual Semantic Mining for Text Alignment and Parallel
Corpus Building for Buddhist Languages”
Multilingual contextual word embedding models have taken the worldof Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the past years by storm.
Usually trained on terabytes of data, they achieve impressive
performance on downstream NLP tasks such as bi-text retrieval whileat the same time drastically reducing the amount of necessaryaligned training data. Since considerable amounts of Buddhist texts
preserved in Chinese and Tibetan are translations from otherlanguages, as well as the fact that an increasing number of ancient
Buddhist texts is being translated into modern languages such as
English, Japanese and Modern Chinese, the construction ofcomprehensive parallel corpora of these languages is an important
step to facilitate their research as well as the development of NLP
applications for tasks such as machine translation. I will discuss theadaptation and training of large multilingual languages models forbitext mining on Buddhist corpora, how the resulting data ispresented for philological research in the BuddhaNexus databaseand how machine translation systems perform when being trained on
this data.

Orna Almogi(Hamburg University)“BuddhaNexus: Underlying Philosophy, Hitherto
Achievements, Future Plans”
BuddhaNexus aims at facilitating the study of Buddhist texts in Pāli,
Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan, and Classical (Buddhist) Chinese,particularly in view of the history of their composition and theirimpact on later texts. Towards this end, it identifies approximate
textual matches between texts written in the same language.
Altogether 220,000,000 such matches have been located, revealinga very high level of intertextuality between the texts. In my talk, I
shall outline the underlying philosophy of the project, the newresearch dimensions it opens up for Buddhist textual scholars andthe challenges it brings along. Finally, I shall also delineate theplans for future developments.

Abstracts: Symposium
Élie Roux(Buddhist Digital Resource Center)

Jörg Plassen(Bochum University)“Digital Humanities at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center”“Tracing the Impact of Buddhist Commentaries from Silla on
Tang Dynasty Huayan: Towards Computer-assisted Analysesof Hidden Text Reuse”

BUDA was built from the ground up without reference to any earlier
software. In developing BUDA we focused on creating new ways toaccess, discover and reuse the Buddhist Digital Resource Center’s(BDRC) large collection through state of the art data technology.
A key feature is the new ability to access and reuse BDRC's 20+
million images through IIIF. Our bibliographical and prosopographicaldatabase is now openly accessible through a standard data format,
RDF. We will explain the new model of the database and how toaccess and query it. Etexts have also been completely reworked andstandardized through a new collaborative project, OpenPecha.
OpenPecha provides a stand-off annotation format with a suite oftools, with the ambition of becoming a new standard in digital
humanities.
Finally, we will show how BUDA federates catalogs and images frommultiple sources and indicates provenance and attribution. We hopethat through a set of common standards and a focus on open accesswith attribution, BDRC can become a digital Buddhist commons
where data and images related to Buddhist studies can be distributed
and accessed.

Korean and Japanese scholars have produced extensive
collections of quotations from early Korean Buddhist texts in
Chinese and Japanese sources solely based on open citations.
However, conventional research on textual influences supports the
expectation that systematically uncovering hidden text reuse will
yield valuable additional material that will testify to an even morepervasive influence of Silla texts on “Chinese Buddhism”.
Drawing on generous support by Volkswagen Stiftung and Bochum
University for our Hanmun Lab, over the next four years we will carryout an in-depth study on text reuse of Hwaŏm Buddhist texts from
Silla within Tang period (617–906) commentaries, identifying
parameters of text reuse through philological analysis, molding
these insights into extensions to a C++/CUDA program as well as
SQL and R scripts, and synthesizing the results into a preliminary
survey on the impact of the Silla texts on Tang Huayan.
Taking the influence of Wŏnhyo 元曉 (617–686) on Fazang 法藏
(643–712) and Chengguan 澄觀 (738–839) as an example, the talkwill provide a glimpse into what is possible already at this stage.

Abstracts: Symposium
Michael Radich(Heidelberg University)

Marcus Bingenheimer(Temple University)“Research Results Acheived by Applying the TACL Toolkit”“On the Use of Historical Social Network Analysis in the
Study of Chinese Buddhism”

In this talk, I will present in brief a number of research findings thathave been arrived at (in part) by the application of the TACL suite ofsoftware tools to problems in textual analysis and intertextuality. I will
focus on a selection of case studies that showcases a range ofapplications and research questions.

Can historical network analysis contribute to our understanding ofChinese Buddhism? The talk will describe some of the methods anddata currently available for the application of formal network
analysis. "Formal network analysis" in this context denotes theanalysis and visualization of clearly defined, computable network
data. After an introduction to network analysis as a method, thepresentation will describe its application with the help of one study.
A closer look at the network region modeling the late 16th early 17th
century reveals two distinct stages in the late Ming Buddhist revival.
Following the Wanli revival brought about by a group of well-studied,famous monks, the network perspective asserts the centrality of
Miyun Yuanwu 密雲圓悟 (1567–1642) and his students who came todominate 17th century East Asian Buddhism. It can be argued thatthe Buddhism of Miyun's lineage differed considerably from thesyncretic, inclusive Buddhist discourse of the "great monks" of the
Wanli era. This important change in the history of Buddhism isvisible in the network.

Abstracts: Symposium
Laurent Van Cutsem(Ghent University)

Gregory Adam Scott(University of Manchester)“Lineages as Network: An Inquiry into the Representation ofdharma Lineages of Chan Buddhism in the Zutang ji 祖堂集”

“Cataloguing Chinese Buddhist Publications in the Chinese
Religious Text Authority”

This paper is a first attempt at examining the genealogical frameworkof “lamp records” (denglu 燈錄) of the Chan Buddhist tradition as
networks, using analytical tools and methods of Historical Social
Network Analysis (HSNA) and graph theory. As an exploratory study,
the primary objectives are to investigate the possibilities offered by
HSNA for research on the socio-religious milieu of production of
Chan records, explore the advantages of this approach over classic
lineage charts, and reflect on its limitations in contrast to morephilologically oriented studies. The paper focuses on the Chan
community portrayed in the Zutang ji 祖堂集 (Collection of the Hall ofPatriarchs). It shows that a relatively marked predominance is given
to the branch stemming from Xingsi 行思 and Shitou 石頭, both fromthe perspective of the genealogical network and the space allotted in
the text. The study also highlights possible irregularities in lineage
claims by contrasting metrics of degree and betweenness centrality
with complementary data (e.g., length of the entries).

The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) was founded in late2019 as an online, open-content repository for bibliographic andscholarly data on religious texts produced in China prior to 1949. It
runs on Mediawiki with a database plug-in to allow the data to bequeried in the style of a library catalogue, and exported for use byother researchers and projects.
Among the more than 3000 current entries, approximately 2500 are
Buddhist publications from the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, including scriptural texts, monographs, and periodicals.
These were produced by scriptural presses, small Buddhist
publishers, and larger commercial presses. Many of the familiar
monastic and lay figures from this era of Chinese Buddhism,
including Taixu, Yinguang, Wang Yiting, and Ding Fubao, arerepresented in the catalogue as authors and editors.
My presentation will explore how I am gathering, editing, formatting,and presenting bibliographic data on Chinese Buddhist publications
from the modern era, and how such a dataset may contribute toresearch in Buddhist Studies. It will examine how best to incorporatesuch data production into a research project that will be result inarticles and a monograph. My aim is to provide some guidance forothers who might want to incorporate such an approach into their own
research.

Abstracts: SymposiumCharles Li(French National Centre for Scientific Research, EHESS)

Kiyonori Nagasaki(International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo)“Using n-akṣaras to model Sanskrit and Sanskrit-adjacenttexts”“Utilization for Digital Images for Buddhist Studies”

Despite – or perhaps because of – their simplicity, n-grams, or
contiguous sequences of tokens, have been used with great successin computational linguistics since their introduction in the late 20th
century. Recast as k-mers, or contiguous sequences of monomers,
they have also found applications in computational biology. Whenapplied to the analysis of texts, n-grams usually take the form ofsequences of words. But if we try to apply this model to the analysis
of Sanskrit texts, we are faced with the arduous task of, firstly,
resolving sandhi to split a phrase into words, and, secondly, splitting
long compounds into their components. This paper will present a
simpler method of modelling a Sanskrit text as n-grams, by using nakṣaras, or contiguous sequences of akṣaras. This model reduces
the need for sandhi resolution, making it much easier to use on raw
text. We will present a number of applications of this model, from text
mining and sequence alignment (collation) to inferring a phylogenetic
network of interrelated Sanskrit and Sanskrit-adjacent (Hindi, Newari,
Tamil, etc.) texts.

Nowadays, digital images are available on the Web from many
cultural institutions around the world, which include many Buddhist
scriptures and paintings. How to utilize these images in Buddhist
studies has become an important issue. Recently, the number of IIIFcompliant images and TEI-compliant bibliography and texts has been
increasing, and they can be used in various intensive ways throughWeb APIs. This presentation will introduce some methods for
aggregating digital images from around the world in an easily
accessible form and utilizing them for Buddhist studies with the IIIF
specification and TEI Guidelines.

Abstracts: Symposium
Carsten Krause
Leo Maximilian Koenig
Leon Woltermann

Oliver Hellwig(Düsseldorf University)(Hamburg University)

Sven Sellmer(University of Poznań, Düsseldorf University)“What Can We Learn from DH Tools and Methods for Buddhist
Studies in the Contemporary Field?”

Sebastian Nehrdich(Hamburg University, Düsseldorf University)

In Buddhist studies, many new DH tools and methods deal with thequestion of how to process canonical texts that have been collected
over several centuries. They reveal questions of authorship and otherpersonal data, text changes, adaptations and omissions of the past.
But what can we learn from this for Buddhist studies in thecontemporary field where canonization processes are still ongoingand internet-based textual material is subject to permanent anddynamic change? This presentation discusses an ongoing work todevelop a personal database of prominent Buddhists in China today.
While the project aims at a creative combination of openly available
data from the Internet (Baidu, Wikipedia, etc.), it is accompanied byquestions worthy of discussion, some of which can potentially besolved using existing tools and experiences, others involve
unforeseen challenges and strive to promote interdisciplinary
exchange.

“ChronBMM – Dating Text Corpora Using Bayesian Mixture
Models”
Corpus linguistic studies are often based on the assumption that thetemporal structure of the corpus under consideration is known.
While such an assumption holds true for important texts of many
European and East Asian corpora, the dates of pre-modern Indian
texts that were (and are) proposed in scholarly research often varyby several centuries. The project ChronBMM develops probabilistic
Bayesian models that use linguistic features in order to narrow
down the temporal range of important Vedic texts and thus provide
future research with a more reliable temporal structure of the Vedic
corpus. Although ChronBMM concentrates on Vedic texts, themodels developed are generic and can therefore be applied tocomparable cases such as Classical Sanskrit and Tibetan.

Abstracts: Symposium
Alexander James O’Neill(University of London)

Patrick McAllister(Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Christian Faggionato(University of Cambridge)“Retro-digital Editions of Sanskrit Texts: Many Problems,Some Solutions”“NLP Pipeline for Diachronic Tibetan and Newar Corpus
Analysis”

The press of the Austrian Academy of Sciences publishes the series“Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region” (TAR). This
series, currently standing at around twenty volumes, is focused on
editions of Sanskrit works that have survived in manuscripts in the
TAR since at least the thirteenth century CE. The volumes
published so far present only a small subset of the works available
in these manuscripts.

Our AHRC funded project is the first comprehensive diachronic
investigation of egophoric marking, the marking of the conscious self.
Through state-of-the-art diachronic corpus methods, we will trace thelexical origins of egophoric markers and compare Tibetan and Newardevelopments side by side.
In the present talk, we will present a fully implemented NLP pipeline
to create deeply-annotated corpora of several historical andcontemporary Tibetan and Newar varieties with five different layersof annotation, ranging from morphosyntactic to information-structural
annotation. We will describe in detail our annotation process – bothfor Tibetan and Newar – and the three phases of our NLP annotation
pipeline consisting of: (1) pre-processing – normalisation andstandardisation, (2) word segmentation, POS tagging and sentence
segmentation and (3) parsing and information structure annotation.
Phases (2) and (3) have an additional step of manual annotation tomaintain a gold standard. In the end, we will discuss how to adapt
our NLP-tools to other Tibetan and Newar varieties that are both lowresourced and under-researched from an NLP perspective.

I will present an ongoing effort to switch to a realistic workflow for
producing both a printed publication and a machine-readable
version of the editions. I will introduce the main considerations
shaping this workflow – technical, practical, and scholarly, and thengive special attention to the relation between the technical design
goals and the scholarly considerations: it is their relation that
motivates scholars to adopt the workflow in their own editorial
projects, and also allows them to ask questions about their works
that traditional editions cannot (or cannot easily) answer.

Abstracts: Symposium
Bruno Lainé(University of Vienna)“Data Design for a Navigation System in the Tibetan Buddhist
Canon”In this presentation, I will address the theme of data design for anavigation tool in the Tibetan Buddhist canon. For the rkts.org site,
three types of data are produced: xml, json and sql; xml for catalogs,
json for indexes and sql for concordances. The organization of thedata in a tree schema also allows to structure the whole corpus andmakes it possible to keep an overview of the existing data pool andof the parts still to be developed.
The data in xml format allow direct visualization of the structures
specific to the cataloged collections; they are a practical tool forentering catalogs. Data in json format are compact files used togenerate index lists. Data in sql format allows quick access to a large
number of concordances between canonical collections.
The rKTs site combines these three types of data to present results
to a user’s search (title, quotation search, etc.) and to provide thepossibilities of navigating in the whole corpus.