This paper explores multilingual minimal computing and plain text for Indian literatures. It focuses on our workflow designed to produce multilingual, annotated digital critical editions of Indian-language poetry, and to model, explicate, and visualize their poetics. In the absence of digital scholarly corpora, resources developed by citizen scholars working outside of academia are essential; for our team and audience, this includes free and open source solutions — including optical character recognition tools — developed in other contexts. Modeling formal, metrical, thematic, and rhythmic structures opens up the possibility for computer-assisted scholarly analysis across the variously related languages and literary histories of India, which are usually treated in isolation. Positioning our work as a form of minimal computing, we discuss our workflow as a jugaad — a North Indian term for reuse and innovation in the presence of constraints.
Rizvi et al. (Sat,) studied this question.