A Japanese Abhidharmakośa: how to download

As Peter Wyzlic posted on Indologica yesterday (see here) a precious Japanese translation of the Abhidharmakośa from 1751 appeared in a scanned version on the net. Unfortunately the interface here is a little bit behind and does not provide a bundled PDF download button and getting the items through one of the several wget/curl shell loops resp. scripts (e.g. see here and here) fails because for some reasons there are always failures (even a repeated delay does not help). But like is has been posted on Archivalia on Friday (see here) for people which are depended on this it and don’t want to right-click-and-save every single page is possible to get the whole titles via links like this.

A new Indological forum

A short notice: after it has been discussed and suggested by Elisa Freschi on her blog (see here and here), Adrian Cîrstei now provided a new Indological discussion forum here. Let it be successful!

Academia.edu

Academia.edu is described as “Facebook for academics” and that’s exactly what it is. Here you can find scholars from everywhere and track their position and contributions, – if registered – link yourself with them and let others follow your work, upload your papers, presentations etc. The whole thing is organized either in reference to the institute affiliation (which reveals once again the naked truth that you are not worth mentioning without, but o.k. it’s not scholaria.net), or alternatively to research interests (people interested in Sanskrit here, still pretty poor). The department browser which runs quite well as a flash widget is at the same time a pretty useful university directory in general which I haven’t seen on the net before like this (63.072 departments stored up to now). There are several thousand people listed so far, among them there are the “popstars” like Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky etc. Very, very nice! There is no need for personal pages anymore. A little bit disappointing: the whole content is user controlled and that seems also to be true for the directory trees. Thus there is two times the EPHE for example, obviously because a single user have failed to check that it was already there (see here). Another thing not so nice is the fact that there are several spam entries, fake users with links to adult sites. Who is monitoring this thing, is there even anybody? Anyway, more than a toy and much better as Linkedin which is used by scholars I know but hasn’t evoked a hype, and became more a platform for non-academic networking. Two thumbs up!

Epic and Purāṇic Bibliography online

The extreme comprehensive Epic and Purāṇic Bibliography (EPB) is now available online here at the Indology in Göttingen. The database contains even more entries than the original printed version which was compiled in Tübingen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1992). The datasets include title descriptions resp. summaries, records of reviews, a quoted passages index and even some library signatures. The quoted passages are searchable which makes this tool even more useful.