About BITIG Data
What This Is
BITIG Data is a curated digital showcase — not a complete dictionary, not a search engine, not a replacement for scholarly editions. It demonstrates that Old Uyghur materials can be:
- Structured into machine-readable formats (JSON)
- Normalized to a unified transcription standard
- Presented with original images, transcriptions, annotations, and sources in one browsable interface
- Extended incrementally — new texts and entries are added by appending to data files
Current Limitations
| Limitation | Why |
|---|---|
| No Old Uyghur input method | The Old Uyghur Unicode block (U+10F70–U+10FAF) was only standardized in 2021. No operating system or third-party IME supports it yet. |
| No audio / TTS | Old Uyghur is a dead language (9th–14th century). There are no native speaker recordings and no speech synthesis models. |
| Curated samples only | The first edition includes ~5 manuscript texts and ~20 dictionary entries as proof of concept. It is not a comprehensive corpus. |
| Latin transcription search only | Without an Old Uyghur input method, search relies on Latin transcription. Browse-by-letter provides an alternative. |
| Placeholder images | Manuscript images require permission from holding institutions (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, National Library of China, etc.). Placeholders are used pending authorization. |
| All data needs source audit | Every entry and segment must be traceable to a published scholarly source. Entries marked "needs source" are provisional. |
Roadmap
- Short term: expand curated samples to 10+ texts; grow dictionary to 100+ entries with verified sources.
- Medium term: add interlinear glossing (morpheme-by-morpheme analysis); integrate with existing digital catalogues (Berlin Turfan Archive, IDP).
- Long term: build a community-editable transcription platform; develop Old Uyghur OCR assistance tools; establish a peer-review pipeline for data quality.
Technical
This site is a collection of static HTML pages with JSON data files. No backend, no database, no JavaScript framework.
Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. All source data is stored in plain JSON files under data/.
The site can be downloaded, modified, and redeployed by anyone.
Built for academic demonstration at the Old Uyghur Studies Conference, 2026.
Contact
[Contact placeholder — to be filled before conference]