Digital humanities

The theories and techniques of Digital Humanities have become ever-more central to scholarly projects in the twenty-first century. But how do early-career scholars gain expertise and understanding in DH? The 2021 publication by Benatti et al., “Learning Digital Humanities in a Community of Practice,” offers important observations about in-project training in Digital Humanities as an alternative to dedicated DH education. The Suśruta Project offers intensive on-the-job training to its participants on this model.

The project’s Fellows and Assistants go through an intensive period of applied learning in a community of practice of Digital Humanities techniques for editorial markup, version control, cloud storage, and interactive collaborative textual criticism. Project participants learn to use best-in-class DH tools for tasks such as,

  • The application of the Text Encoding Guidelines to medieval manuscript sources ,
  • XML file creation and editing,
  • Version-control and file-sharing, including the use of GitHub,
  • Online collaborative text-critical editing,
  • File management and transfer using ftp clients,
  • International, remote academic project collaboration.

After working on this project, participants will take forward to their future careers a significant set of new skills and experience in Digital Humanities.

Indology and philology

Textual criticism and editorial technique are essential tools for understanding the ancient literature of South Asia. Manuscript evidence for ancient works is often abundant, but early-career scholars need to learn how to locate, read and interpret these manuscript resources, and how to turn raw manuscript readings into new knowledge about the ancient past.

This project offers its participants experience in how to edit, read critically, interpret and write about ancient Sanskrit literature. The project’s Research Fellows and Assistants go through an intensive period of applied learning in a community of practice of editorial and hermeneutical techniques. Project participants learn how to,

  • Read palaeographically challenging scripts;
  • Interpret scribal abbreviations, corrections and glosses;
  • Evaluate and judge alternative readings and interpretations of passages in the light of literary and historical context;
  • Access and interpret medieval commentaries;
  • Record the processes of interpretation so that they can be understood by a wider audience;
  • Evaluate and interpret a critical apparatus;
  • Practice deep reading;
  • Translate, applying linguistic, historical and hermeneutical considerations.

Junior members of this project develop strengths in these areas through transcription and editing work, and by attendance at the weekly project seminars.