The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism: A Collaborative XML-Based Reference Work that has become a Field Standard: Technology and Sustainable Management Strategies

The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism: A Collaborative XML-Based Reference Work that has become a Field Standard: Technology and Sustainable Management Strategies
Muller, Charles. A., acmuller@jj.em-net.ne.jp Center for Evolving Humanities, University of Tokyo,
The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (DDB) (http://buddhism-dict.net/ddb/subscribing_libraries.html), now on the Web for more than 15 years, has come to be regarded as a primary reference work for the field of Buddhist Studies. Containing over 54,000 entries, it is subscribed to by more than 38 university libraries (http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/subscribing_libraries.html). It is supported by the contributions of over 70 specialists, many of these recognized leaders in the field. It can perhaps be described as example of the type of web resource hoped for by Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not A Gadget, or something similar to the sort of thing envisioned by Joseph Raben in his Busa lecture at the DH2010, in the sense of being the fruit of the collaborative efforts of a community of scholars that has reached a degree of status and sustainability such that it has been able to grow and thrive—despite having little funding or the support of a major organization or team of programmers—in the age where such resources are so readily eclipsed by the combination of Wikipedia and Google. The field of Buddhist Studies has its own reliable, scholarly-edited, fully documented and responsible online reference work that has developed a center of gravity sufficient for it to continue to grow as the resource that specialists turn to without hesitation, and to which they may contribute knowing that they will be clearly accredited, and that what they write will not be deleted or changed in the following moment by, for example, a junior high school student.

With the DDB having a history almost equal in length to that of the WWWeb as we know it (it went online in 1995), there is a wide range of issues that can be discussed beyond its present technical structure. Of great importance are the management strategies that have allowed its continued progress through the long series of changes the Web has witnessed during this first epoch of the Internet. How, exactly, can a project that is based on the continual development of quantity and quality of reference data can continue to grow to the extent of becoming the de facto primary field reference work after exhausting the first couple initial grants, without either becoming a fully “pay-for” resource (perhaps being bought out by a commercial enterprise of some sort), or being supported by some private organization — an alternative fraught with the danger of forcing the resource to co-opt its principles and its objectivity?

I began the compilation of the DDB and its companion CJKV-English Dictionary (CJKV-E) in 1986, originally simply envisioning the eventual publication of the usual printed work. In 1994, however, the Web made its appearance, and the potential advantages of trying to develop a reference work online in a collaborative manner were immediately apparent. So in the middle of 1995, I converted my WordPerfect word-processor files to HTML, and placed the dictionary on the web. To my great elation, I was soon contacted by a few good scholars with similar interests, who were willing to offer both content and technical advice.

During its first few years on the web, the DDB was maintained in a simple, hard-linked HTML format. With the help of Christian Wittern, this source was converted to SGML, and then XML. A major turning point in the history of the project came in January 2001, when Michael Beddow offered to help with Web implementation, and for the first time, the raw XML data was searched and presented to users through a combination of Perl and XML/XSLT technology. At that time, building a search engine that could deal with mixed Western/CJK text in UTF-8 encoding was a not at all a simple matter, so Michael's search engine was a bit of a novel creation—and was able to serve its purpose with only minor tweaks up through most of 2010, for almost a full decade.

When Michael Beddow's search engine was set up in 2001, usage of the DDB increased dramatically. Yet despite our repeated pleas for user contributions, except for a very small number of “enlightened” individuals who somehow naturally grasped the meaning of this strange new thing called “web collaboration,” it became apparent that there were very, very few people willing, on their own, to take five or ten minutes to write up and send us even a couple of terms from their own research work. This lack of interest on the part of users in making contributions was extremely disappointing. Thus, while our password security system was originally set up to ward off hacking attempts, we decided to experiment with using this apparatus to institute a two-tiered system of access. In the first level, any user could access the data a limited number of times in a 24-hour period, logging in as guest. In the second level, contributors were granted unlimited access. We started off setting the guest limit at fifty, but leaving it at this amount for a few weeks we received neither complaints nor contributions. We then began to gradually drop the number down to forty, thirty, and then twenty searches in a day. At twenty, there was still nary a complaint made nor contribution to be seen. But when we hit the number of ten, everything changed. We were first bombarded with indignant complaints, but holding the line, and at the same time lowering the minimum required level of contribution to the equivalent of one A4 page for two years of access, eventually these complaints began to turn into contributions. This was a watershed moment for the project, because we found that once people contributed one time, most of them continued to do so, whether voluntarily, or by continued prompting through this same arrangement.

At the time of my first public presentation of the DDB at a meeting of the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative (EBTI http://buddhism-dict.net/ebti/) in 1996, the DDB contained approximately 3,200 entries. That number is now over 54,000, with a present average growth rate of 4,000 terms per year. The continued growth in popularity of the DDB, especially as a reference work for graduate and undergraduate courses in Buddhist Studies in North America and Europe generated one more access problem that needed resolution—that of how to allow for the use of the DDB in the case where an instructor wanted to use the dictionary for an university course. To deal with these kinds of situations, we decided to begin to offer subscriptions to university library networks for a modest fee. This policy brought about an unforeseen benefit, in that we could now provide a list of reputable institutions that had deemed the DDB to be an academic reference of high standards. It also generated a small but steady income, which allowed us to pay for hardware and software, and a couple of part-time workers to do input and editing. Finally, in order to encourage contribution from qualified scholars, great effort was expended toward letting members of the field know of the contributions being made by their colleagues. Thus on the dictionary's web site itself, as well as on associated news and mail lists, information regarding new contributions is energetically distributed.

This presentation will start off with a short demonstration of the most advanced functions of the DDB, to be followed by a brief overview of its technical framework (P5- influenced XML, delivered through XSL and Perl). We will then outline the above-introduced key factors of the management of the DDB that we believe have most directly contributed to its great success.

References:
Lanier, Jaron 2010 You Are Not A Gadget, Alfred A. Knopf New York

Muller, A. Charles 2009 “The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism [DDB]: Present Status and Future Developments., ” Scholars of Buddhism in Japan: Buddhist Studies in the 21st Century, International Research Center for Japanese Studies Kyoto 87–100

Muller, A. Charles, and Michael Beddow 2002 “Moving into XML Functionality: The Combined Digital Dictionaries of Buddhism and East Asian Literary Terms, ” Journal of Digital Information: Special Issue on Chinese Collections in the Digital Library, Volume 3, issue 2 (link)

Raben, Joseph 2010 “Humanities Computing in an Age of Social Change, ” DH2010, July 8, 2010 (link)