Sunday, July 14, 2019

Gandhipedia - Online Repository about Mahatma Gandhi


 

Gandhipedia - Online Repository about Mahatma Gandhi
Now, Artificial Intelligence to decode Gandhian literature
Ahmedabad: Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced formation of ‘Gandhipedia,’ an online repository about Mahatma Gandhi, during her budget speech, citing the initiative as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in 150th birth anniversary this year.

The project is comprises of a team consisting of experts from IIT Kharagpur (IIT-K) and IIT Gandhinagar (IIT-Gn). Three primary members of the team include professor Animesh Mukherjee from the Complex Networks Research Group (CNeRG), IIT-K, as primary investigator (PI), professor Mayank Singh from IIT-Gn Lingo group as co-primary investigator (Co-PI) and Dr T S Kumbar, librarian, both from IIT-Gn. The project is supported by National Council of Science Museums (NSCM) under the ministry of culture.

“Gandhipedia is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled tool to access the works of the Mahatma Gandhi in a completely indexed and digitised form. It will support natural language queries, strong visualisation support to observe how the social network of the Mahatma changed over his lifetime spatially as well as temporally,” said professor Mukherjee.

In run-up to the 150th birth anniversary celebration, Gandhi Heritage Portal (GHP) has already put a huge database on Gandhian literature in digital format. The repository includes 100 volumes of Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Professor Mayank Singh explains that how Gandhipedia plans to take the work forward.

“We are leveraging AI for searching, indexing and visualization of data based on the text. Result of the initiative can be answer to queries such as how Mahatma interacted with different personalities over a period of time, how many times a specific person or place finds mention in the texts, preparing graphs on the basis of time and location,” said professor Singh. “We are collaborating with various Gandhian institutes for the same as a number of texts come under copyright purview.”

The project also aims at digitizing resources such as doctoral works which are not included in conventional Gandhian literature. “The end-result would be fully-searchable texts like Google books,” he added.

The budget or duration of the project is not yet fixed, the researchers aim at long-term association to take Mahatma Gandhi to the new audience in new format. The entire database generated would be available in public domain, added researchers.


Regards

Mr. Pralhad Jadhav  

Master of Library & Information Science (NET Qualified) 
Research Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository  
Khaitan & Co 
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
Mobile @ 9665911593

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