South Asia Studies Digital Humanities Workshop
2024 University of Pennsylvania
Organized by Kashi Gomez and Jajwalya Karajgikar
The Penn Libraries and Department of South Asia Studies present a space for technology orientation, where participants will strive for a nuanced and informed understanding of the possibilities and limitations of critical digital humanities tools, particularly Computational Text Analysis (CTA) of content found in manuscripts, inscriptions, maps, and other historical documents.
The discussions in these sessions aim to bring together South Asia scholars, digital humanities specialists, data librarians, subject specialists, research software & programming engineers, and manuscript studies curators to engage in conversation about the field of collections as data at large.
Andrew Ollett, Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, will deliver the keynote address "Texts as Data: Tools and Perspectives for South Asianists."
Learning Objectives:
Prepare a Multilingual text for OCR and HTR
Use Google Cloud Vision and Python to perform text recognition and extract the data as a searchable text file
Use Python to transliterate South Asian languages into Roman script
Perform a simple text search with grep, Google Pinpoint, and visualize text data with Voyant Tools
Conceptualize projects and research questions that utilize computational text mining and analysis
Sponsored by: Department of South Asia Studies, Research Data and Digital Scholarship, The Penn South Asia Center, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the Wolf Humanities Center, and Research Data and Digital Scholarship’s AI Literacy Interest Group
South Asia Studies: Theories and Methods Working Group
2019-2022 Townsend Working Group, UC Berkeley
Organized by Kashi Gomez and Priya Kothari
While the dominant narrative of area studies suggests that the field grows out of post-World War II political interests, this account occludes another powerful shaping force for the field of South Asia Studies. As Mishka Sinha points out in her history of Orientalism in the American Academy, South Asia studies equally emerges out of its early mid-nineteenth century incarnation as an offshoot of comparative philology under the departmental heading of Orientalism (Sinha 2013). The disciplinary anxiety inherent to area studies is co-mingled, for South Asianists, with rigorous philological expectations of our field, which further excludes scholars of South Asia from engaging in conversations that are not comfortably housed in the Western academy outside of a traditional Classics department.
The vision for a “South Asia Studies: Theories and Methods” working group is the culmination of several years of discussion about how South Asianists at Berkeley hope to shape the field and bridge the gap between deep localized knowledge about the traditions that we work on and the theoretical and disciplinary landscape of the American academy. This working group is structured in a seminar style with broadly theory or methods-based readings grouped under disciplinary headings. While there are ample opportunities to engage with theory across the Berkeley campus, this working group provides an important space for South Asianists to wrestle with the particular challenges posed by our temporal frameworks and unusual archives in relation to foundational texts on theory and method.
Debates on Sanskrit Grammar: Vyākaraṇa Workshop
2022 UC Berkeley
Organized by Kashi Gomez, Priya Kothari, and Janet Um
This two-day workshop brings together scholars across the Bay Area to engage with longstanding debates in the Sanskrit grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa) and the historical role of Sanskrit grammar in the development of ‘American philology.’ This workshop reflects on how Sanskrit grammar can shape new directions for scholarship on South Asia. In this two-day workshop, renowned Sanskrit grammarian and Emeritus Professor Madhav Deshpande will lead three seminar-length lecture and reading sessions.
In premodern South Asia, knowledge of grammar (vyākaraṇa) was essential for ritual efficacy and scriptural interpretation. And ‘grammar envy,’ was a central underlying aesthetic of the Sanskrit cosmopolis. Kings jockeyed to demonstrate their grammatical prowess (Pollock 2006), philosophical schools developed their own sectarian grammars and outwitted their opponents by pinning their arguments on grammatical principles (Fisher 2017; Ganeri 2011), and grammatical correctness formed the backbone of Sanskrit literary theory and criticism (Bronner 2010; Patel 2014). The study of Sanskrit grammar is also closely entwined with the nineteenth-century adoption of Sanskrit in the American Curricula as it sought to define a distinctly ‘American philology (Sinha 2013).
This workshop focuses on the last important grammatical treatise of the Sanskrit tradition, the Paramalaghumañjūṣā of Nāgeśabhaṭṭa (1700-1750 CE), which condenses and explicates longstanding linguistic debates across philosophical schools. Examining this treatise as both a primary text and a pedagogical tool, the overarching aim of this workshop is to think about the longue durée of Sanskrit pedagogical models. In conversation with Professor Deshpande, we ask how the study of Sanskrit grammar can shape new directions in our own scholarship on South Asia.
Sponsored by: the Saṃskṛtaparaṃparā fund, the Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professorship in South and Southeast Asian Studies, the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, the Group in Buddhist Studies, the Townsend Center Conference & Lecture Grants, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Linguistics, and the South Asia Studies Theories and Methods Townsend Working Group.
Berkeley Mīmāṃsā Reading Workshop
2019 UC Berkeley
Organized by Lisa Brooks, Kashi Gomez, Priya Kothari, and Janet Um
This two-day workshop offers Sanskrit scholars across the Bay Area the opportunity to engage deeply with mīmāṃsā, the preeminent school of Indian hermeneutics, while thinking more broadly about the state of philology in the field of South Asian Studies. The workshop with Emeritus Professor Alexis Sanderson takes up the issues of scriptural interpretation, philology and methodological recuperation.
Our proposed engagement with mīmāṃsā stems from two key concerns. Firstly, while mīmāṃsā initially emerged as the discipline of Vedic exegesis, it was further developed into a more diffuse theory of language which finds its way into a wide array of genres, from ritualistic texts and scientific treatises to exegetical discourse, poetics and literary commentary. Secondly, in recent years, leading scholars have cast mīmāṃsā as the philological school par excellence of premodern India.
As such, we have identified philology as one of the key disciplines of South Asia studies. We recognize that mīmāṃsā continues to shape how we read Sanskrit texts in modernity and engage in discourse about Indic traditions and Hindu and Buddhist theology and practice. This workshop is a unique opportunity to enrich our own textual engagements and encourage discussion about the potentials and limits of such philological recuperation efforts in the field of Indology. With these goals in mind, we pose the following workshop questions: What does it mean to cast the mīmāṃsā school of scriptural interpretation as an Indic philology? And what does it mean to claim philology as the pre-eminent mode of engagement with Sanskrit texts?
Sponsored by: the Saṃskṛtaparaṃparā, the Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professorship in South and Southeast Asian Studies, the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, the Group in Buddhist Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the South Asia Studies Theories and Methods Townsend Working Group.