Collaboration

Dear scholar, if you wish to become a regular contributor to PANDiT, please join us. Once your account is approved, you can add new content. In your profile, please tell us know briefly about your interests and expertise. Please help us make the data in PANDiT better and richer! Create an account now.

10 reasons (plus 1) you contribute data to Pandit

  1. Pandit is the richest database of Indic prosopography tens of thousands of entities and hundreds of thousands of relationships.The data you contribute about persons, works, manuscripts, etc., will necessarily relate to data entered by others. The data others enter will, in turn, relate to those you contributed and so on, thereby producing new knowledge.
  2. It makes little sense to create independent, niche databases when Pandit's broad framework allows you to combine datasets and learn new things from the combination.
  3. You become part of a growing community of scholars working with and contributing to Pandit.
  4. You get credit for your work, and your contributions will be cited with your name as a contributor.
  5. All the data on Pandit are accessible, open, and free.
  6. All the Pandit data is downloadable--whatever you and others give to Pandit, you can always "take home."
  7. Pandit is constantly updated, both data-wise and structure-wise.
  8. Pandit is flexible and responsive: if you find something (a field, an entity, a tool, a label, etc.) to be missing or lacking, we will be happy to work with you and add it to our structure.
  9. Pandit plans to create research tools that will use its rich data to create family trees, intellectual lineages, maps, and so on.
  10. It's fun!

Collaborations

Pandit has collaborated with the Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism (SKSEC), founded and headed by Sheldon Pollock at Columbia University. SKSEC can be said to have pioneered the prosopographical approach to South Asian intellectual history. The first cache of data imported to Pandit resulted from the hard and careful work of SKSEC's diligent contributors.

We are also working in collaboration with Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts (SARIT). This digital humanities initiative provides electronic editions of texts in Sanskrit and other Indian languages, all marked (tagged) using the rich Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) system. One of our goals is to provide direct links from works listed on our website to SARIT's actual texts.

In 2015 Pandit entered a collaboration with the "Age of Vedānta" project headed by Professors Ajay Rao (University of Toronto) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell). Graduates working with professors Rao and McCrea enter data on what during the second millennium CE became the dominant school of thought within Hinduism. The data-entry phase of this contribution began during the summer of 2016. The team working on this project, headed by Jonathan Peterson from the University of Toronto, has completed entering the first out of three printed volumes that make up BORI's descriptive catalog on Vedānta: 377 manuscripts that belong to about 200 works have been entered, as well as 1515 extracts and various other related entities (authors, scribes, etc.). Overall, we successfully imported a third of the dataset. We hope to complete the work by the summer of 2019.

Credits

Pandit's policy about its data is simple: all the data is public, freely accessible, and sharable under Creative Commons licensing (specifically, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). We ask our users to give fair credit to Pandit when credit is due and, of course, contribute from their knowledge and experience to the database. We hope we have succeeded in creating clear and straightforward credit and citation protocols for Pandit to encourage researchers to contribute to the database, knowing that their contributions will be professionally recognized. At the bottom of every content page, there is a list of everyone who has contributed to it. Pandit uses a basic algorithm to calculate the weight of every contributor's contribution. The order in which the names are listed (in this list and the suggested citation) reflects this algorithm. We will revisit the algorithm as needed as we go along. Of course, our system saves all the revisions to any given entity. A reader can access old revisions and compare them to more recent ones.

Read on to find out about our plans and specific phases news.