184 year-old Indian library goes digital, including 444 yr-old book on Alexander
nextbigwhat.com
nextbigwhat.com
1) Origins, dating and translations of the literature - the sangam lit, the andal songs, etc.
2) Exactly what the fuck was happening in south india from 500 BC to 500 AD? There are Roman coins found in south india and south indian coins found in Rome. One of the Ptolemies refer to a pandian king. Pliny the younger complains about the amount of money spent on indian goods by the roman people. Apparently the romans also had a huge space reserved for indian peppers. One of the chinese explorers have some descriptions of a port in tamil nadu. All this more or less sums up what we know about this period. I know I have to cite sources but it will take a lot of time to hunt them down and I'll do it over the next few days. What else was happening? How did the people dress? Did they know about the greek and the roman ideals?
3) The pallava kingdom - Why were they so into sculptures? Why did they practice so much religious tolerance unlike the later cholas, for example? How did they come to power?
4) The chola kingdom - are the names of the kings really all that we have about the early cholas who ruled around jesus's time? How come they went out of power and then came back into power after five centuries? What were the pandavas doing when the cholas were in power? Were they hunted? Why were aditya karikala's murderers pardoned by raja raja chola? Is it truly about their caste? We have a shitload of kalvettus from this time - can we translate them all and upload them online, please?
5) Do we have anything at all to go by in terms of the food they ate at any period in history? How did the language change over the two millennia?
Edit: There simply aren't that many books published about south indian history. There isn't all that much digging up either. There is one Nilakanta Sastry who is cited by everyone who talks of Cholas, but his books have been out of publication for decades. In comparison, we have hundreds and hundreds of books published on every conceivable aspect of a number of other civilizations - about the changes in english, greek and latin over the years, the mayans, the rise and fall of rome, histories of the various european monarchies, the aztecs, etc. [all of which interest me hugely].
Indians have never shown interest towards quality research in history. Heck we don't even respect the symbols of history we have amidst us. We either demolish archeological evidences(Many demolished during new Airport road construction in Bangalore) or use them as places where lovers hang around to escape from their parents. Just look at the state of historical monuments and how badly they have been maintained, if it was not for some tourism value even those would have long vanished.
Apart from that much of the historical research comes from the archaeological work carried out during pre-independence era during British time or immediately post that. Archeological Survey of India is a joke, and much of the historical research is left to curious professors from universities who are severely underfunded.
I think even if research is carried out now, we are only likely to find out half truth and much of the story will have to reconstructed piecing things together.
Interesting choice of words there - 'rechristened'. In any case, many of the names were reverted back to their original forms (not just cities, but things like surnames too).
Also, the great era of Cambodia seems to have been founded by a family from south India, which is backed up by art historic evidence and the earliest Chinese diplomatic materials. The same goes for the Cham kingdom of Vietnam. That's a hell of a long way to sail, and further than the great Buddhist Borobodur monument on Java, Indonesia, which was also built by south Indians.
Another area of India I'm ultra curious about is Assam ... as everyone's going to Burma, Assam is clearly more interesting! (Written from Yunnan, just east of there, in southwest China)
I think this effort is great. I hope more and more history can be put on line and made accessible. I am a firm believer that knowing the past is the only way to know where you are going.
No idea what I'm trying to say here, by the way.
If you waited until stuff was selectable/searchable (i.e. transcribed) then you'd never get these types of documents online. The scanning part of this process is tough considering that either a) very decent equipment must be bought, staff must be trained, extreme care must be taken handling old documents, all this costs money and takes time; b) the scanning must be outsourced because the archive doesn't have the competencies or tech and this is done at a cost.
Archives regard documents in there special collections as assets belonging to the institution. There is a resistance to putting them online. Once they are online they can be 'stolen'. If you want to have the whole lot transcribed first it could take decades because of the sheer volume of documents and the lack of researchers and archivists (and its not really the job of an archivist to transcribe stuff, merely to synopsize for a descriptive list and catalogue). For instance, The University of London, a liberal institution founded by Jeremy Bentham, wanted to get all of Bentham's documents online. Except the guy was a prolific correspondent. It was taking them years and years to transcribe the Bentham archive and they had only gotten (I don't remember exactly but something like) 2% through it. In the end the crowd-sourced the task[1] by scanning everything, putting the scans in a wiki and letting everyone on the net have a go at transcribing the documents - they are 94% done now. And that's just one historical figure. Take into account that documents need to be semantically marked up using standards like TEI (Text Encoding Initiative; an XML format) and that researchers in these areas are not known for their techie skills and wouldn't know a programming language if it came up and bit them on the bum and you can see ...
Finally, the institution may never have done research on the documents in the archive and may want to vet everything before it goes online, or may be reluctant to 'give away' its jewels. There is a serious tension between enabling global research and respecting the 'property' of the archive. This is something that needs to be dealt with now and is what I'm a part of, at the moment we call it the digital humanities.
Hope that gives you an overview. Well done to the Kerala State Central Library.
Not including the staff, I think there was about $75k in hardware and about $5k/yr in consumables (mostly repairing book stands, buying CDs and replacing CD burners we wore out).
If anyone is curious, here are two projects I worked on: Early American Fiction (1789-1875): http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/ Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass archive (a whole bunch of versions): http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/whitman/
Note that these were both created 12-15yrs ago and offered both high quality scans and searchable text, and even basic comparison (split screen view of two texts: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/whitman/whitframe2.html).
Subsequently, UVA's library has joined TEI and I'm sure things are much more modern now, but I wanted to provide a little more flavor to what you posted, with some more examples. Obviously, manuscripts in any language are time consuming to transcribe. They are often in poor condition and handwriting can be downright illegible, and don't get me started on issues with accurately transcribing original authors' own grammatical and spelling mistakes! Argh!
[1] http://www.phaseone.com/en/Camera-Systems/P-Series.aspx [2] http://www.apexglobal.in/apextranscription/index.htm
That's an odd way to represent a number.
3,28,268 = 3 lakhs 28 thousand and 268
1,84,321 = 1 lakh 84 thousand and 321
1 Lakh = 100 Thousand 1 Crore = 10 Million
They fall in between the million-billion range.
1--> billion 0--> 10 crore/100 million 0--> crore 0--> million 0--> lakh 0--> ten thousand 0--> thousand 0--> hundred 0--> tens 0--> ones