INTELLEXUSGeology of Texts, Genealogy of Concepts, Intellectual Ecosystems: Mapping the Indic and Tibetic Buddhist Text Corpora

28. März 2024, von AAI Webmaster

We are happy to announce that the ERC has awarded a Synergy grant to Orna Almogi, Harunaga Isaacson, and Dorji Wangchuk from the Universität Hamburg (UHH) and Shai Fine from the Reichman University (RUNI) in Israel for the project “INTELLEXUS – Geology of Texts, Genealogy of Concepts, Intellectual Ecosystems: Mapping the Indic and Tibetic Buddhist Text Corpora.” A total sum of 9,902,166 Euro has been awarded (approximately 7 million Euro to UHH and 3 million Euro to RUNI) for the six-year period April 1st, 2024 – March 31, 2030.

Project Description

India and Tibet have both been home to great Buddhist cultures, producing a vast quantity of learned literature in respectively Sanskrit and Tibetan. In recent years, a flood of such texts has become available, also in digital form.

Specialists have long studied Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts with painstaking philological-historical methods.  Now, inspired by the profusion of materials that has become available, and recent advances in computer sciences (Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing in particular), a team of experienced textual scholars in Hamburg has joined forces with specialists in computer sciences from Reichman University in Israel, to carry out an innovative project which aims to develop cutting-edge computational tools to revolutionize the study of this material. Chief among these are the automatic identification and matching of concepts, both mono- and cross-lingually, tasks that go far beyond the matching of texts. 

In addition to developing computational models and tools, which have the potential to bring about a transformation also in the study of similar materials from other cultures, the project will map three large Buddhist text corpora in Sanskrit and Tibetan, shedding light on their interdependence, their interactions also with other, non-Buddhist, texts, and the processes of their evolution.   

The INTELLEXUS team will comprise four groups, working in close synergetic collaboration. A group focusing on Sanskrit and on textual history (geology of texts) will be led by Harunaga Isaacson; a group focusing on canonical Tibetan and on the history of ideas (genealogy of concepts) will be led by Dorji Wangchuk; a group focusing on paracanonical Tibetan and on history of textual culture (intellectual ecosystems) will be led by Orna Almogi; and a computer science group will be led by Shai Fine, with Kfir Bar supervising NLP research and development efforts.