Programmer and Digital Humanist (full‐time)
Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra
Unit: Faculty for Cultural Studies (Institute of Indology and Tibetology)
Start Date: 1 October 2012
Application Deadline: 31 August 2012
Salary: TV-L E 13 payscale (between 3,187 and 4,599 euros per month depending on experience)
Term of appointment: until 31 December 2015, with the possibility of renewal
Part‐time employment is possible in principle.
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) is one of the most renowned and largest universities of Germany.
Job Description
You will be responsible for the technical maintenance and development of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī database. Gāndhārī is a Middle Indo‐Aryan language used in ancient Gandhāra (northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) and in Central Asia (Xinjiang, China) from ca. the fourth century BCE until the fourth century CE. As an important literary and administrative language of this region, Gāndhārī played a central role in the spread of Buddhist literature from India to Central Asia and China. The Dictionary database, established in 2002 at the University of Washington, currently contains transliterations and images of 2,635 Gāndhārī documents (manuscripts, inscriptions and coin legends) – the large majority of known sources for this language. At the same time, archeological discoveries continue to enlarge the Gāndhārī textual corpus, and only a small part of the currently known texts is available in scholarly editions. The Dictionary of Gāndhārī is thus being compiled on the basis of a growing body of sources, and the Dictionary database in turn supports ongoing editorial activities. Further information on the Dictionary of Gāndhārī is available at http://gandhari.org/dictionary/.
We are looking for an experienced programmer and digital humanist who will convert the content of the Dictionary database from its current custom PostgreSQL schema into a TEI‐conformant XML schema following specifications provided by the editors, and who will develop a hosting solution and web applications for this content on the basis of either a relational database or an eXist native XML database. After this fundamental format conversion, the programmer / digital humanist will continue to broaden and improve the presentational and analytical capabilities of the database system in accordance with the needs of its editors and users (including mechanisms for linking transcriptions and images of source texts, advanced search procedures taking into account lexical and grammatical metadata, and methods for integrating information from the database with editorial actions into full‐fledged dictionary articles and grammatical descriptions). The programmer / digital humanist will further assist with the typesetting of web and print publications of the project “Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra,” with special attention to the automation of editorial tasks on the basis of the Dictionary database.
Full job description at http://www.uni-muenchen.de/aktuelles/stellenangebote/technik/20120720074055.html (English version)
