Intellexus strives to revolutionise the study of Indic and Tibetic Buddhist intellectual cultures, by combining the hitherto well-tried historical-philological methods and the history of ideas perspective with cutting-edge computational tools and techniques and a new theoretical approach of intellectual ecosystems. The project aims at mapping three large corpora of mainly Buddhist texts: Indic, Indo-Tibetic, and Tibetic, so as to make it possible to understand how these corpora evolved and how the respective intellectual cultures developed and thrived as complex dynamic systems. With a flood of texts in Sanskrit and Tibetan becoming available, the philological approach needs urgently to be supplemented, updated, and revised, especially in the light of developments in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. Taking on this challenge, Intellexus will develop innovative methods for investigating the interdependent evolution of the three corpora and sophisticated visualisations of the intricate interactions, within and across cultural, linguistic, and religious boundaries. More broadly, the project also strives to provide a model that can transform the study of other intellectual cultures and have impact on other domains of interest.
Intellexus involves two main research groups. A humanistic group, which is based at the University of Hamburg (UHH), consists of philologists focusing on textual material from one (or more) of the three corpora under investigation and covering a range of genres and topics that serve as case studies for the development of the computational tools. The group comprises three sub-teams, each focusing on material from one of the three corpora under investigations. The computer-scientific group, which is based at Reichman University (RUNI), comprises two sub-teams, including a research team, focusing on language modelling and algorithm development, and a technology and development team, focusing on the empirical work, software development of the technology, and support and management of the compute environment.
Intellexus has two main parts, micro- and macro-level, each covering three years. The micro-level focuses primarily on individual texts, concepts, and elements of the intellectual ecosystems, and aims to develop monolingual computational tools and methods for Sanskrit and Tibetan. This level also involves historical-philological groundwork for texts selected as case studies, and investigations of the overarching topics “Patterns of Intertextuality” and “Intersecting Pathways of Ideas.” In the macro-level we zoom out in focus to develop methods that can be applied cross-lingually and across the corpora and the entire intellectual ecosystems. These include clustering, stratification, cross-lingual matching of texts and concepts, and visualisations. On this level, we will apply the developed tools and methods to the case studies, and investigate the overarching topic “Profiling Intellectual Ecosystems.”
