Chattha Sangayana (Sixth Council) Edition’s usefulness for electronic media :
One of the biggest difficulties in text inputting projects is that when one wants to convert this data into a user-friendly electronic form, thousands of man-hours of scho...
Chattha Sangayana (Sixth Council) Edition’s usefulness for electronic media :
One of the biggest difficulties in text inputting projects is that when one wants to convert this data into a user-friendly electronic form, thousands of man-hours of scholars are needed for editing. Thus we see that there are many such projects which end up being mere collection of the texts.
When VRI made the pali Canon widely available by harnessing the electronic media, it benefited immensely from the work of editing done by Sixth Council. Thus, most of the credit for VRI’s work goes to the Sixth Council. After a brief review of VRI’s efforts in digitalisation of pali texts, We shall see how the massive work of editing of about 50000 pages of Pali texts was done during the Sixth council with remarkable wisdom, consistency and accuracy. The Sixth council edition stands the test of consistency and accuracy required for software programmes making it one of the finest and most intricately interconnected electronic text of ancient scriptures. It was as if the Sixth Council knew beforehand the rigorous demands placed on data for it to be used easily by software programmers to render it into a lucid inter-linked user-friendly source.
We shall also see how the editors of the Sixth Council have done much more that still needs to be exploited to make it an even more useful source of data. The electronic text places greater demand on the scholars involved in preparation of the text in electronic form.