Towards a digital research environment for Buddhist studies

This article will explain the structure and function of a digital research environment for Buddhist studies entitled Research Base for Indian and Buddhist Studies (RBIB). In the field of Buddhist studies (and especially in the area of Indian Buddhism), scholars face various obstacles in their efforts to share materials—in both paper and digital media. In establishing the RBIB, we have considered it to be of paramount importance to preserve the continuity of the prior tradition of studies within the paper medium, while at the same time developing a methodology that takes best advantage of the digital medium. After identifying six basic conditions that will satisfy the demands of both approaches, we have implemented a Web collaboration system that fulfills these conditions. Our system also makes functional parts of the RBIB that enable the presentation of the relationships between arbitrary fragments of related texts in various canonical languages through a user-friendly interface, which in turn allows users to learn how to edit and browse relationship data. Our system has thus far been highly evaluated by testers, and it has been further facilitated by recent developments in Information Communications Technology. Humanities digitization has a deep mutual relationship with this new technology. ................................................................................................................................................................................. With increasing number of electronic texts and other research materials available on the Web, the role played by digital resources has become more and more central in the field of the Humanities, and Buddhist Studies is no exception to this trend. At the same time, it must be admitted that this basic availability of digital resources has not necessarily led to a drastic improvement of the research environment. Although a considerable amount of Buddhist texts have been digitized and made available online, these resources are for the most part not optimally set up for advanced scholarly use. Most importantly, they lack standardized interface that would allow interoperation among them and work with equal efficiency for the philological data in Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Chinese, and other languages in which Buddhism has been transmitted. In addition, the method of digital presentation of research results is yet to be established. Scholars of Buddhism are now in urgent need of a welldefined framework for the mutual integration of digital resources scattered across the Web. In this article, we shall first try to determine the requirements for the digital research environment of Buddhist Studies focusing primarily on its philological aspects and then present our tentative approach to the solution of the problem through the implementation of a collaborative Web framework called the Research Base for Indian and Buddhist Studies (RBIB). Correspondence: