Strategies of Effective Digitization of Commentaries and Sub-commentaries: Towards the Construction of Textual History

TL;DR

This paper presents the 'Textual History Tool', a digital platform designed to assist philologists in digitizing and analyzing commentaries and sub-commentaries to reconstruct the historical evolution of texts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel digital tool that captures the textual evolution through functional units and phylogenetic analysis, enhancing textual history reconstruction.

Findings

Successful digitization of multiple commentaries on the KV text

Generation of phylogenetic trees based on functional units

Enhanced understanding of textual evolution through the tool

Abstract

This paper describes additional aspects of a digital tool called the 'Textual History Tool'. We describe its various salient features with special reference to those of its features that may help the philologist digitize commentaries and sub-commentaries on a text. This tool captures the historical evolution of a text through various temporal stages, and interrelated data culled from various types of related texts. We use the text of the K\=a\'sik\=avrtti (KV) as a sample text, and with the help of philologists, we digitize the commentaries available to us. We digitize the Ny\=asa (Ny), the Padama\~njar\=i (Pm) and sub commentaries on the KV text known as the Tantraprad\=ipa (Tp), and the Makaranda (Mk). We divide each commentary and sub-commentary into functional units and describe the methodology and motivation behind the functional unit division. Our functional unit division helps generate more accurate phylogenetic trees for the text, based on distance methods using the data entered in the tool.