Taming the Wild Etext: Managing, Annotating, and Sharing Tibetan Corpora in Open Spaces

Abstract

Digital text is quickly becoming essential to modern daily life. The article you are reading right now is born digital; unlike texts of the not-so-distant past, it may never be printed at all. Worldwide, the trend is clear: Digital text is on the way in, and print is on its way out. Year-by-year, more and more readers are turning to ebooks, internet news, and other forms of ereading, while generation by generation, print is becoming less and less relevant. 1 1 Pew research shows 50% of Americans have a dedicated ereading device, with yearly gains in ereadership [1]; industry research, too, shows a definite trend toward ereading and non-traditional publishing, with ebooks making up 50% of fiction reading in 2016 [2], while journalism is also trending online [3]. These trends are not unique to English—to meet the demands and expectations of today's readers, Tibetan texts, too, are being digitized by many organizations and institutions with a shared appreciation for the Tibetan literary heritage. They include a variety of secular publishers, monastic institutions, and Buddhist foundations, among others. But while these organizations share common goals for common texts, their work is all too frequently completely disconnected from the community at large. This situation negatively impacts what is already a minoritized and under-resourced language. While competition—from other languages, as well as other publishers in the Tibetan etext world—has been a driver of innovation in the adoption of ereading technology, we believe that a rich, shared data source is not only in everyone's best interest but also the only practical way forward when we consider the time, effort, expertise, and money that quality digitization takes. That is why we have designed OpenPecha to be a public, open platform for collaborative etext curation and annotation sharing. Its aim is providing a wide range of users with the latest version of the exact “view” of any text needed, while maintaining the integrity of the text and its annotations and simultaneously allowing for community improvements and additions. In this article, we explore the details of how the project came to be, what it is, and how it works, while also presenting a few common use cases.