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Project Guide

BuddhaNexus will publish the textual matches of the various languages and textual corpora gradually, as work progresses. It will also keep on improving the algorithms so as to improve the results of both the monolingual textual matches and their respective translingual alignments. For the upload of new data, major improvements of existing functions, and introduction of new functions, see News. In general, the biggest challenge has been to set “gold standards” in order to get the best results, on the one hand, and avoid “noise,” on the other. While striving to optimize the default “gold standards,” BuddhaNexus understands that such standards may fluctuate depending on the text under inquiry, research questions, and personal interests, so it allows the user to manually set several of the parameters. Moreover, in order to facilitate analyses from different perspectives, several view options are possible.

The textual corpora used in BuddhaNexus were obtained from various institutions (for details, see the individual languages). Due to the huge amount of material, there has been no attempt by BuddhaNexus to improve the quality of the texts (e.g. removing typos and the like). Occasionally, however, some minor changes to the texts were made for technical reasons (e.g. standardization of transliterations or formats). As our algorithms search for approximate (and not exact) matches, we believe that in most cases variants resulting from typos, or from different orthographies and the like, should not pose major problems in detecting textual matches.

Enter the Database

In order to enter the database, select the language of your choice by either clicking on the respective symbol or selecting it from the top menu bar, under “Database.”

Submit an Inquiry

In order to submit an inquiry select a text from the dropdown list by using their respective catalogue numbers (for details, see the guide to the individual languages). Once the matches have been generated (Text View), you can view them by either scrolling down and up or by selecting the passage you are interested in by selecting the respective folio number from the dropdown list. You may alternatively select a text from the sidebar (opens upon clicking on the triple bar symbol situated on the left side of the menu bar), which offers an overview of the available texts according to thematic sections of various kinds.

Global Text Search

The Global Text Search offers a search by a text passage. Upon typing in a text passage (max. length 150 characters), a list with the pertinent hits will be displayed. Hits for which a multilingual data is available are listed on first and are marked as such (“MULTILINGUAL DATA VAILABLE”). A click on any of the results will display the full text in the Text View mode. The total number of possible search results is limited to 200 items.

Filter Options

  • Similarity Score: Uses string edit distance as a base for calculation. These can vary between 0 and 100%. The value 100 means a perfect match, while a lower value indicates less similarity. The default value varies from one language to another.
  • Minimum Match Length: Filters by minimum length of the matches based on the match’s number of characters, excluding punctuation signs. The default value varies from one language to another.
  • Exclude Collections: Does not display the matches found in the excluded collections (or sections).
  • Exclude Files: Does not display the matches found in the excluded files.
  • Limit to Collections: Displays the matches found only in the selected collections (or sections).
  • Limit to Files: Displays the matches found only in the selected files.

View options

  • Text View: Upon selecting a file, the entire Inquiry Text with the passages for which matches are found is shown. The presence of matches in the Inquiry Text is indicated by colours. To view the matches use the scrollbar, to go back to the beginning of the Inquiry Text click the symbol, to display the Inquiry Text in a new tab, click the symbol. Upon selecting (by clicking) any of the coloured positions, the matches found in various Hit Texts for that position will be displayed in a new column. Whenever multilingual alignment (Sanskrit—Tibetan) is available for the Inquiry Text, the multilingual match would be displayed first, followed by the various monolingual matches found in other texts. (An option for disabling the multilingual match display is available in the filter.) By clicking on any of these matches the respective Hit Text will be displayed in yet another column, with the match in question highlighted. All matches with the Inquiry Text found in the displayed Hit Text are coloured. To display the Hit Text in a new tab, click the symbol .
  • Table View: Displays a table of the matches found for the current Inquiry Text. The results can be sorted in three different ways: (1) by their position in the Inquiry Text, (2) by their position in the Hit Text(s), and (3) by the length of the match in the Hit Text.
  • Numbers View: Displays a table with the segment numbers of the matches found for the current Inquiry Text. This view mode is only available for Pāli and Chinese texts, where the segment numbers represent the PTS and Taisho numbers, respectively.
  • Multilingual View: Displays automatically generated sentence alignment between a given Sanskrit text and its Tibetan translation in a table form. This view mode is available only under the category “Multilingual”.
  • Graph View: Displays various graphs visualizing the (approximate) matches found for the Inquiry Text. The pie graph displays the distribution of the (approximate) matches according to the collection’s sections. The histogram shows the distribution of the top files that have matches with the Inquiry Text based on the accumulated length of the approximate matches. A maximum of 50 Hit Texts are shown.

Links

BuddhaNexus makes effort to provide useful links of various kinds. These include, whenever possible, links of the individual files to the websites from which the digital texts were obtained and to websites offering cataloguing data. Currently links with the following websites are available: SuttaCentral and VRI for Pāli, GRETIL, DSBC and SuttaCentral for Sanskrit, BUDA and rKTs for Tibetan, and CBETA, SuttaCentral and CBC@ for Chinese.

Visual Charts

The Visual Charts display the intertextuality between collections, sections within collections, and single texts using a Sankey diagram. To choose a language, click on the respective symbol. Upon selecting the Inquiry and Hit collections, a Sankey diagram displaying the distribution of the matches will be generated. The display colouring scheme is available in three options: gradient, according to the Inquiry Collection, or according to the Hit Collection. You can reduce the display to a single section (by clicking on the left fringe of that section), and then further to a single text. A click on the left fringe of the selected text leads you to Text View, where the matches of the selected text (Inquiry Text) are displayed.