Digital Transformation of Written Heritage of Tibetan Buddhism: State of the Art and Prospects

Abstract

Introduction. Making public knowledge pertaining to Buddhist culture proves important and topical enough due to the steady growth of global significance attributed to East and Central Asia. Therefore, insights into monuments of Buddhist heritage represented in vast collections of Russia — at advanced academic and technological levels with an emphasis on the active use of digital technologies — shall yield solutions to quite a number of sociocultural development problems, and strengthen positions of our nation in Asia’s geopolitical environments. Goals. The study aims at analyzing the current state of the art in digitization of Tibetan Buddhism’s written heritage and assessing some promising AI related technologies development trends. Materials and methods. The study provides a comparative analysis of activities by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) consortium, an oldest and most successful initiatives operating since 1999, for advanced approaches in this field. The use of artificial intelligence methods to solve the problem of creating a machine-readable text corpus of Buddhist writings and machine translation is considered as a promising direction. Results. The work discloses key principles of digitization and representation of written monuments implemented on the new digital platform BUDA (Buddhist Digital Archives), shows effectiveness of the underlying IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and LOD (Linked Open Data) architectures. The efforts to assess artificial intelligence technologies prospects included a pilot study on the use of ‘deep learning’ neural network methods to create an experimental model for optical recognition of Tibetan characters which yielded a result of 94 % of recognized characters. This lays a foundation for flow-line decoding of Tibetan-language scans and creating a comprehensive corpus of Buddhist writings in a machine-readable format, which offers the challenge of developing new efficient digital textual tools. Conclusions. The integration of existing and promising approaches allows for a digital transformation of Buddhist written traditions, the latter to open new functioning forms and development opportunities in the contemporary world backed with a possibility to reveal the cultural and intellectual potential of Buddhist civilization for modern society to the full.

Keywords

• digitization
• tibetan buddhism
• written heritage
• artificial intelligence
• deep learning