TEI 2019

What is text, really? TEI and beyond


All PapersTEI

Encoding history in TEI: A corpus-oriented approach for investigating Tibetan historiography

Mathias Fermer

Keywords: Tibetan biographies, marked-up corpora, quantitative methods, historical network analysis
Permalink: https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:tei2019.189

Encoding history in TEI: A corpus-oriented approach for investigating Tibetan historiography#id_OrgXref.orga472947

Mathias Fermer (mathias.fermer@oeaw.ac.at)

My presentation addresses a system for deriving historical evidence from Tibetan primary sources by applying semantic markup to the texts' key entities (i.e. persons, places, literary works and artefacts). This markup system follows the TEI-P5 guidelines and has been developed in the framework of the Sakya Research web-application (https://sakyaresearch.org/) which holds a large corpus of machine-readable sources in Classical Tibetan, ranging from medieval chronologies and histories to illustrious life stories of Buddhist masters.

The markup applied to the digital collection has been designed in line with the historiographical nature of the texts: It captures information about historic agents, the places they visited, as well as artefacts and literary works mentioned in varying contexts along the chronological sequence of the individual texts.

Using TEI-markup in this way has proven particularly useful in my own research for depicting the social, geographical, artistic and doctrinal contexts of the texts' narrative subjects (and their authors). It allowed for tracking teacher-student relationships and exploring the geographic expanse of those masters' regional networks, to give two examples for how the empirical evidence from TEI-encoded texts can be assessed.

I will address the concept behind this markup and its potential for a quantitative, intertextual analysis that goes beyond single texts. What can Tibetan historians gain from markup-technology, if systematically applied to a wider corpus of literature?

I will argue that the data deriving from a consistent annotation of primary literature on a large scale will gradually change our understanding of Tibetan history. At the same time, such a corpus-oriented approach to historiography raises several conceptual and practical questions about how, and in which form encoded information can best be stored, analysed, displayed and reused.