Do.M.En.I. – Dongba Manuscripts Encoding Initiative
Do.M.En.I. means Dongba Manuscript Encoding Initiative. It’s a CL.A.U.D.I.A. parallel project, originating and taking form by Dongba pictograph manuscript tradition and digital humanities study.
Do.M.En.I. is focused about implementing an on-line encoded corpus of Dongba manuscripts as a World Wide enjoyable resource for Dongba manuscript and Naxi pictograph literature, according to W3C standards for text and corpora encoding.
World Wide web technology at today should be seen as the wider library to be consulted for information retrieval and documents browsing, especially in Academic world for exchanging of material and up-to-date information which run faster then every paper-publication or review.
Many digital humanities application is dedicated to texts browsing and documents retrieving, and cover large range of kind of information: from daily newspapers to linguistic annotated corpora or more specialized archives. Plenty of digital texts and their extreme heterogeneity pushed W3C consortium (among other world wide question) to define some base guidelines for digital encoding of text and corpora digital encoding. at today W3C recommends TEI guidelines for digital texts encoding and CES for corpora encoding.
Do.M.En.I., project of diffusion and acculturation about Dongba pictograph manuscript tradition and Naxi people culture, follows and accords to W3C standards recommendations because it’s the best way to open such cultural and artistic treasures to academic world and all members of human kind. Do.M.En.I. thus operates in retrieving of just-available on-line resources re-organizing them in a CES according corpus, proceeding to single manuscripts encoding according to TEI recommendations.
At today two are the only available on-line resources for Naxi pictograph manuscripts tradition, both displaying some tens of digital reproduction of manuscripts pages:
- Library of Congress, a selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection: http://memory.loc.gov/intldl/naxihtml/naxihome.html → 24/06/2009, with stored in, available as images.
- Naxi manuscripts archives of Harvard University Library O.A.S.I.S. project (on-line Archival Search Information System): http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hyl00002 → 24/06/2009, with manuscripts stored in, available as images
they have heterogeneous standards for digital reproduction of manuscripts, moreover both corpora is just stops to “0 level” of text encoding. (Lenci et al., 2005: 57) , for Dongba pictograph text reproduction of manuscripts pages, sequences of images without any deeper structural, meta-structural, linguistic, syntactic and semantic annotation.
Do.M.En.I. projects if focused in building a complete (and open for up-to-dating initiatives) resources as annotated corpus of Dongba manuscripts, and this plays for:
- safeguard and conservation of Dongba manuscripts and Naxi pictograph literature
- diffusing and enjoying Dongba tradition and Naxi pictograph literature
- convergence and unification of just-existing online resources
- implementation of new resources according to W3C standards
- study of Dongba pictograph writing system
- study of Naxi language
Do.M.En.I. targets are finally summarizable in 2 main scores:
- defining and building a codify schema for encoding Dongba pictograph manuscripts according to TEI standard
- implementing a World Wide Corpus of encoded Dongba manuscripts according to CES standard
For wider documentation please visit Do.M.En.I. and CL.A.U.D.I.A. dedicated pages.
