As the museum consultant for JAINpedia, my main responsibilities are to ensure that an ongoing programme of related events is put together for the project. With this in mind, I have been busy working with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) over the last few months to create an exciting series of activities for the Jainpedia display between 2010 and 2012. (more…)
The college is closing down tomorrow for the holidays so we won’t be around until January 2010.
However… (more…)
Last week I had the opportunity of attending the Arts & Humanities Research Fair at King’s College as a representative of the JAINpedia project. The aim of this Research Fair was to display and talk about the different arts and humanities projects based at King’s. It was an open event that allowed visitors (mainly researchers and students) to explore, talk and learn about the different research projects that are being carried out by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH).
It was a fascinating event that encouraged an exchange of ideas between different projects and allowed many people to hear for the first time about the JAINpedia project and Jainism. The JAINpedia stand, with its bright colours and poster, attracted numerous people who showed great curiosity and interest in the project.
Many students and researchers from King’s found JAINpedia a very positive learning initiative for gaining knowledge about Jainism and making the collections accessible to a wider audience.
We also took the opportunity to show them some of the beautiful digital images of manuscripts that will appear on the JAINpedia website. Everybody looked stunned and we had incredibly positive feedback.
Some students were keen to know more about the different phases of the project and how it has been developed. They looked at images of wireframes, mock-ups, as well as the blog, and we encouraged them to contribute to the blog with comments.
There’s no doubt this Research Fair has brought some valuable exposure of JAINpedia to a wider audience. I really enjoyed the experience, and I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped make this year’s Arts and Humanities Research Fair possible.
As a professor of Indian studies at the Sorbonne, my academic interests include not only Jainism but Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Theravada Buddhism, and Hindi languages and literature of the 20th century. Although I am fully involved with Jainpedia and have worked for some years with the Institute of Jainology and other institutions in the UK on Jain-related projects, my work in Jainism arose only towards the end of my undergraduate career. (more…)
I’m very pleased to report that a few weeks ago we received nearly all of the digital images of the manuscripts we requested from the Wellcome Library.
You will be able to start appreciating the beauty of these artefacts in these small photos.
A manuscript is made up of a number of folios. A folio is a sheet of paper or other material that has writing and sometimes an illustration on each side of the sheet. Each folio bears the handwriting of a scribe who used ink to write by hand. Many of the folios are also painted in full colour.
Kālakācāryakathā © Wellcome Library, London
For most of the manuscripts we’ll be displaying on the forthcoming full Jainpedia website, each page (one side of the sheet) has been photographed. Sometimes a manuscript will consist of only one or two folios, because of its age, its material or the conditions in which it was kept before being held in a professional curated environment. (more…)
Hello Readers! I am Rajiv Anand and I work as the museum/heritage consultant on the Jainpedia project. I have been involved since April 2009 and will see this part of the project through till April 2012.
I am glad to state that the project is going from strength to strength and developing further its professional links and contacts. It’s now a familiar brand with its major heritage partners, which are the V&A, British Library, Bodleian Library (University of Oxford) and Wellcome Library.
There will be a series of exhibitions and displays at these institutions, which house some of the most important Jain collections outside the Indian subcontinent. (more…)
We are now beginning to recruit people to support the outreach activity that will be part of JAINpedia.
On Saturday 3rd October 2009 we will be holding our first sign-up session at the JVB Sayer Centre in London. A training session will take place in the afternoon. Light refreshment will be provided.
The morning session will be an informal ‘find out more about the project’ session, where you will get the chance to ask questions and see how you can be involved. Anyone can go to this general session.
The afternoon session will be a formal INSET training session. It is only for those who want to get involved in the education part of the outreach programme.
Although the majority of the work will be delivered in 2010, we urgently need volunteers with the following skills as soon as possible:
If you would like to be a volunteer with JAINpedia then please get in touch now.
Spaces on the day are limited so to find out more information and register your interest, please email: chetna.kapacee@jainpedia.org or call 0208 997 2300.
As a new member of the team, I am very pleased to be part of the Jainpedia project. It’s been just two weeks since I joined the team, and as a Technical Developer, I will be taking care of the front-end development of the Jainpedia website.
I am very excited about helping to get this amazing project up and running, and I am looking forward to contributing to the creation of this website.
Before coming to work at CCH I didn’t know much about Jainism. I am looking forward to finding out more about this ancient religion and increasing my knowledge of it.
I believe that Jainpedia will become a powerful tool for finding resources and helping people to learn about Jainisim.
One of the main features of the Jainpedia website is that it will be accessible to all members of the public, and everybody will have an opportunity to be able to learn more about it.
I know that putting this content online will be tremendously valuable as it will help the preservation of the Jain cultural content (manuscripts, digital artefacts and so on) so they won’t be lost to future generations.
I am looking forward to begin this challenging and exciting journey and I will be sharing with you the stages of the development of the Jainpedia website.
Watch this space!
Hi, I’m Chetna Kapacee and I am the Outreach Consultant working on JAINpedia. Having been brought up as a Jain, I feel very honoured and privileged to be working on this project.
This is going to be one of the biggest Jain projects ever to happen in the UK and it follows on from the Jain Art from India – The Peaceful Liberators exhibition at the V&A in 1995, which many people in the Jain community still remember.
Alongside the development of the website, there is going to be a three-year programme of outreach work with the community. (more…)
Hello! I’m Paul Vetch, and I head up the design and development team for the Jainpedia website, which we’re working hard on at the moment.
You may be wondering – what is Jainpedia going to be like? How will it look? Most importantly, what will it let me do that I can’t do now? Needless to say, we’ve been giving all of these questions a lot of thought as we try to sketch out our vision for what an online encyclopaedia should be like in 2009 and later. (more…)
