11th Century Kannada Literature Now on Wikisource


By Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI


In Kannada poetry, Vachana Sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing that evolved in the eleventh century and flourished in the twelevth, as a part of the [url=http://www.cheapermichaelkorsoutlet.us.com/]cheapermichaelkorsoutlet.us.com... movement. L. Nagabhushana Swamy, are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called Sanchaya and ready to enrich Kannada Wikisource. Swamy had trouble using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching the text was a huge problem. I (Pavithra Hanchagaiah) started to help gather information about vachanas and document it in Unicode by writing scripts for open source software. Further discussions were made to get thousands of vachanas in the form of a database, so that they could be made easily searchable with an index. This demanded that we build a platform supporting all these activities, which would help the linguistic researchers, students and members of the general [url=http://www.cheapermichaelkorsoutlet.us.com/]http://www.cheapermichaelkorsou... public who have an interest in reading and studying Vachana literature. With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model, and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime I was running various scripts to fix errors in conversion of ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to consume by the modules developed for concordance. We spent weekends and holidays executing this project from home. With the constant feedback and guidance from Mr Swamy and Vasudendra, we learnt how concordance of text is used by researchers and what would make it easier for them to research on Vachana Sahitya. Omshivaprakash worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements free and open source software technologies were used to keep the platform active while managing the entire project. I provided critical hacks for [url=http://www.cheapermichaelkorsoutlet.us.com/]www.cheapermichaelkorsoutlet.us... digitization and gave feedback through suggestions.


Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki jquery ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!