[HN Gopher] The Lotus Sutra Project: Conserving and Digitising 8...
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       The Lotus Sutra Project: Conserving and Digitising 800 Manuscripts
        
       Author : tintinnabula
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2023-04-18 06:02 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blogs.bl.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blogs.bl.uk)
        
       | rbanffy wrote:
       | When I started reading the title, it quickly switched from a
       | sports car to a digital preservation effort. Loved the effect of
       | the radical change of expected subject on my brain.
        
       | akudha wrote:
       | Those interested in such projects - please check
       | 
       | https://scrollprize.org/
       | 
       | It is _very_ interesting. And it has a million dollar prize too
        
       | contingencies wrote:
       | See also http://idp.bl.uk/ which is the parent project and
       | international frame of cooperation for similar texts, many of
       | which remain untranslated despite being digitized. There is a
       | fairly strong need for people to study
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharosthi amongst other things. ML
       | will probably help analyse the corpus eventually.
        
       | luminati wrote:
       | " The Stein collection contains over 1000 copies of the Lotus
       | Sutra in Chinese, which were acquired by Sir Marc Aurel Stein in
       | 1907 and 1914, when he visited the so-called 'Library Cave' (Cave
       | 17) at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, in the present-day Gansu
       | Province in China."
       | 
       | Nice way of saying theft - Fuck colonialism!
        
         | the_third_wave wrote:
         | Had he not brought them they might well have been lost or
         | destroyed, would that have been better?
         | 
         | Also, "fuck colonialism", does that also go for the colonialism
         | as practised by non-white non-European colonisers? You _do_
         | realise that nearly every scrap of land has changed hands many
         | times over in world history? What about the colonialism as
         | practised by e.g. the islamic empires which grew out of what is
         | now called Saudi Arabia? What about the colonialism practised
         | by the Zulu and the Xhosa? The Incas? Toltecs? Aztecs? Fuck
         | them as well? The Japanese? Australian aboriginals? The
         | countless groups of  "native Americans" who conquered and were
         | conquered in turn in a never-ending bloody merry-go-round?
        
           | digilypse wrote:
           | None of that seems like particularly nice behavior in
           | retrospect. We could maybe also agree that the typical
           | motivation behind taking things home was probably not to
           | benevolently preserve historical records for future
           | generations, although it's nice that things worked out in
           | this case.
        
         | nsajko wrote:
         | If this is theft, who's the thief? The explorers who bought the
         | documents, or the monks who sold them?
         | 
         | Relevant Wiki pages:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunhuang_manuscripts
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogao_Caves
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-19 23:01 UTC)