Marked up to be included in the ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference Abstracts book.
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Initially developed by scholars familiar with European and American manuscripts, the TEI is now being pressed into service for the encoding of non-western texts. Will the TEI develop as a closed fraternity of western computer programmers and editor/scholars, or will it emerge as an open, egalitarian community of global scholars, who are interested in applying digital technology to the world’s literature? On the one hand, there are practical issues faced by encoders of non-western texts, such as the lack of reliable Unicode for all language scripts and the economic difficulties associated with training non-western scholar/editors in TEI. On the other hand, there are hermeneutic issues raised by TEI going global which are prompted by the general understanding of texts as information rather than as the materially embodied corpus of a culture. Some of the specific issues raised by Tibetan texts in this regard will be used to examine the theoretical tailoring of TEI without presuming that non-western texts will wear TEI comfortably.
Tibetan texts present several challenges to the TEI. Among the practical issues are these: as an endangered language, Tibetan has no government support for its preservation or for its study by the international community of digitally trained scholars. As a minority language, Tibetan waits on a Unicode version guaranteed to represent all of its scripts. Despite these practical problems, because the Tibetan cultural heritage is text-based, it is an obvious candidate for TEI. Even if TEI cannot restore Tibetan texts to their original cultural function, the preservation and encoding of Tibetan manuscripts and transcripts can at least keep one of the most distinctive Asian cultural traditions on
There are, however, other problems raised by the modern encoding of traditional Tibetan texts—problems that are hermeneutic in nature, pertaining to our underlying understanding of what a text is and what needs to be encoded in a text.
With regard to readers' mental preparation, traditional Tibetan libraries contain many
A second issue raised by traditional Tibetan texts concerns the ritualistic manner of their reading. Because many of these texts are practice texts, which lay out the particular steps that a meditator would follow in his or her daily meditation practice, the traditional method for reading these practice texts is a training style. It is unlike the reading style used for most western texts, because it requires precision of pronouncing each word (at least in one’s head), accurate counting of the chants requiring repetition, and accompanying visualizations of a detailed nature. Within the Tibetan tradition, many manuscripts are not meant to be read through once from start to finish, but are meant to be scripts for daily meditation practices, involving ritualized bodily and mental gymnastics.
To encode a Tibetan practice text as though it is to be read straight through, in the way that most western texts are read, would neglect its most important function, which is to train the reader in meditation. The solution is not to trivialize Tibetan meditation practices by encoding loops for repeated chants or by encoding inserted graphical images for visualizations, for this would not respect accomplishments expected of the reader/practitioner. It is the reader/practitioners who must contribute the repetition of chants or the visualization of a meditation deity to their reading of the practice text, and a software program that supplied these would sabotage the training that the text instantiates.
Finally, a third issue concerns whether the TEI codes can distinguish between different audiences for the encoded manuscript: can TEI tags be designed to discriminate between a reader who is practicing meditation with the text and a reader who is reading the text for standard western research purposes? A reader who has no interest in meditating or in Tibetan beliefs may read the text as a work of literature, philosophy or history; this reader would benefit from TEI codes that mark the structure and bibliographic details of the text. The TEI tags would allow this first kind of reader to read the text
The TEI’s application to multilingual, multicultural projects is not a simple, uniform expansion but is a hermeneutic exercise in acknowledging and facing its horizons. Textual practices that are unproblematic within one’s own culture may be problematic in another culture, because the farther one travels from one’s own culture, one finds that texts function in radically different ways. These multicultural horizons need not be limitations on the TEI, but they should be kept within the broad, panoramic view of what the TEI is trying to accomplish.