Minimal Computing for Exploring Indian Poetics

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.