There is a longer story behind Indoskript 2.0. The
original Indoskript project, a cooperation between the Universities of
Berlin (Harry Falk) and Halle (Walter Slaje), was funded by the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the years 2000-2005. In this
relatively short period, we were able to collect more than 185,000
letters, ligatures, numbers, and other graphical signs from over 850
manuscripts, to date and geolocate the manuscriptological evidence,
and to comment on peculiarities of single manuscripts or writers. Our
scientific team consisted of Katja Hofmann (kh), Jürgen Neuss (jn),
and Harry Falk (hf) from Berlin, and Katrin Einicke (ke) from Halle.
Andrew Glass (ag) contributed substantially from the British Museum collection to the Kharosthi part of the database.
Oliver Hellwig was responsible for the technical
realization.
During this period, we developed Indoskript as a
desktop tool for PC and Windows XP. As the support for this platform
was finally discontinued, we decided to transfer data and information
to a more permanent representation. With the financial
support of the
Stiftung Ernst Waldschmidt, we were able to develop
Indoskript 2.0 as a web interface that reproduces the core
functionalities of the original Indoskript, but can be accessed from
any platform.
As the PC version was held in German and the comments on the
sources and individual akṣaras have been adopted whole-sale, the comments
remain in their original form and will, hopefully, be replaced by English
equivalents in due time.
We hope that the new version will find a similarly
interested audience as the original one.
Harry Falk, Berlin
Oliver Hellwig, Berlin