DHTRAC

The idea for this centre derives inspiration from the life and works of Padma Shri Artaballabh Mohanty who taught at Ravenshaw College for more than 25 years, beginning 1914. Under the aegis of the Prachi Samiti founded by him in 1925, Mohanty and his collaborators inaugurated humanist research into early modern Odia literary and theological traditions. The consortium situates itself in this genealogy of humanist scholarship at Ravenshaw, and seeks to extend it into the twenty-first century. The goal of this consortium is to help set up an establishment for advanced research in Humanities. The mission of the proposed Centre is to create a resource pool for advanced research in Odia language and literature. The objectives are: a) To create searchable library / archival collection b) create datasets for research in Odia computational linguistics c) To create digital principal editions d) To encourage and support advanced research in Humanities.

With the aforesaid objectives, our research is currently focused on.

A) The Odia Corpora Initiative. For this purpose we have identified four groups of texts — Abhidhana, Vyakarana, Ganita chautisha, Ayurveda, and the Odia epic Sarala Mahabharata. In the first phase of the project these texts will be mined for datasets such as:

i) Creation of Ravenshaw corpus of Odia texts – with transliteration, and a parallel corpora of Hindi and English translation equivalences

ii) Odia wordnet

iii) Lexical markers; types and tokens

iv) Treebanks

v) Annotated corpora to enable all levels of linguistic analysis (lexical to pragmatic)

vi) Creation of digital editions of selected texts

B) The second phase of the Centre’s research initiatives will concentrate on:

I. Editio princeps and Digital Humanities Lab – Preparation of editio princeps, that is digital first editions, of Odia texts.

II. Multilingual Research Network: Digital database of primary sources on Odisha in non-Odia language traditions such as Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu and Assamese