Tibetan Renaissance Seminar > Participants > Christopher Bell
Christopher Bell Assignments from the Tibetan Renaissance Seminar
Week 2 (01/29/2007): Thematic Markup of Blue Annals Chapter in English - Blue Annals Ch 2
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: Given that this file was already initially marked up, my work involved a more incremental focus. I corrected format issues, such as font uniformity, corrected misspelled and incorrectly marked up words, and added mark up when needed.
Week 3 (02/05/2007): Thematic Markup of Blue Annals Chapter in Tibetan - Blue Annals Ch 7
Status of assignment: final.View here.
Comments: This was four days worth of work, where I marked up various key terms such as names, places, texts, dates, dialogue, and deities. I also justified the Tibetan alignment and corrected typos. I noticed several fragments of Tibetan in the original document that did not have an equivalent translation in Roerich. These discrepencies should be noted in the process of developing a more accurate translation in the future.
Week 4 (02/12/2007): Biography - Zurpoche Śākya Jungné
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: I honestly felt that the detailed biographical template provided was too unwieldy in the process of migrating it to a wiki environment. Therefore, I took a number of liberties in developing a more table-friendly template, though the fields for information not yet known have been left out. No doubt this will pose a great problem, and so I suggest that a fuller wiki-friendly template be developed that takes into consideration all fields that the original document template covers.
Week 5 (02/19/2007): Structured Monastery Entry - ka thog, zha lu, na len dra, mtho lding
Status of assignment: final.
View here: ka thog, zha lu, na len dra, and mtho lding.
Comments: Again, as with the detailed biographical template, I felt the monasteries manual template was even harder to translate adequately into a readable table format in order to present the information culled on these monasteries. Therefore, I again took what I could from the document template and refashioned it into a wiki format. Likewise, many fields are missing, usually corresponding to information not found or known. These wikis have been linked to those pages that list these terms on the Place Names Cited in the Blue Annals page.
Week 6 (02/26/2007): Term Dictionary Analysis - gzungs, gtsug lag khang, slob dpon, sgrub thabs
Status of assignment: final.
View here: gzungs, gtsug lag khang, slob dpon, and sgrub thabs.
Comments: These wikis have been linked to those pages that list these terms on the Blue Annals Terminology page.
Week 7 (03/12/2007): Gazetteer Feature Entry - lha sa, ri wo rtse lnga, gu ge, Śambhala
Status of assignment: final.
View here: lha sa, ri wo rtse lnga, gu ge, and Śambhala.
Comments: Given that the "thdl gazetteer/Place Name Dictionary" page has been consistently unavailable, and the Gazetteer itself has suffered technical issues in recent weeks, I copied the template I previously used for the Structured Monastery Entry assignment and made slight changes to reflect the concerns of the assignment and details of the locations I researched. These wikis have been linked to those pages that list these terms on the Place Names Cited in the Blue Annals page.
Week 8 (03/19/2007): Summary of a Blue Annals Chapter - Blue Annals Ch 8, Part 3
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: While Willa contributed a great deal of analysis, I added further comments and observations that I felt were necessary. Furthermore, I cleaned up the format and order, as well as corrected misspellings and inaccurate information. I also added anchors at the top for the whole page so that the parts can be viewed quickly without the need to search through the text.
Week 9 (03/26/2007): Concept Encyclopedia Analysis - Maṇḍala
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: I was unsure of the degree to which this was supposed to read more like an encyclopedic entry (as per the instructions) or more like a standard paper. If an examination of the maṇḍala in The Blue Annals was necessary, as was suggested, then the amount of detail required for that would make it more like a paper than an encyclopedic summary in my mind. Hence, because I wrote a section viewing the maṇḍala through The Blue Annals, it reads more like a paper.
Week 10 (04/02/2007): Annotated Thematic Bibliography - Tibetan Deity Cults
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: I gave strongest annotated credence to those sources of greatest importance to the bibliographic focus, as the majority of sources are minor and, while informative, are too specific to be more than an aid to the more detailed sources enumerated. I also added an anchored table of contents at the top of the page for ease of searching.
Week 11 (04/09/2007): Text Analysis - Maṇi Kambum
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: See specifically the sections on Structure, Audience, History in The Blue Annals, and Significance. In collaboration with Alison Melnick.
Week 12 (04/15/2007): Timeline of a Chapter - Blue Annals Ch 10
Status of assignment: final.View here.
Comments: The input structure did not exactly mimic the manual instructions, especially with regards to putting in uncertain frames of time. The input fields specifically would not accept question marks, ranges of dates (i.e., 1130-1170), or plus and minus signs (i.e., 1150+/-20). Therefore, I made informed but generic assessments for dates that I otherwise could not confidently place (i.e. 1150, 1250). Also, it seemed more efficient to mark an entire life as an event; creating separate events for the birth and death of an individual seemed way too redundant and time-consuming and would not have allowed me to fill in the Long Description field with much detail. Therefore, there were one or two events within the life of an individual, pertaining to that individual, that I noted in the Long Description field, but for which I did not create a separate event catalog.
Week 13 (04/23/2007): Interpretative Topical Essay - Tibetan Deity Cults as Political Barometers
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: The main portion of this essay that concerns our period is my discussion of Avalokiteśvara, which I feel in some ways reiterates what was said in the Maṇi Kambum essay but also ties it in with the focus of this essay. I do not discuss the Blue Annals because I felt it was not relevant to my broader focus; let me stress that this was a contingency of the instructions.
Week 14 (04/30/2007): Reference Analysis of a Chapter - Blue Annals Ch 3
Status of assignment: final.
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Comments: For my reference analysis, I chose to search for place terms in Chapter 3 of the Blue Annals.