IT experts, who spoke on the various challenges faced by Kannada in the modern era, at the 82nd Kannada Sahitya Sammelan on Saturday, felt that digitisation of literature and knowledge was the only way to preserve and develop Kannada. Speaking at a session on Kannada and the new generation, computer technologists and open source knowledge activists called for increased efforts to digitise all available knowledge in Kannada.
“Internet is to today’s world what printing was to the 18th century. If various streams of knowledge had not been expressed through printing, it would not have been available to the common man,” S.R. Vijayshankar, writer who heads the Kannada Sahitya Parishat Technical Committee, said.
“Therefore, we have to strive to add all kinds of available data in various disciplines to the Internet so that it survives for future generations to see and learn,’’ he said.
He urged the government and corporate companies to invest in teaching Kannada to non–Kannada employees, translating company data and putting up more Kannada content on their websites.
He regretted that Kannada computing was sluggish as various government departments were not converging their programmes and funds.
Young Ministers, like Priyank Kharge, should take the initiative of bringing together various departments for the cause of Kannada, he said.
He added that governments have been pushing for digitisation initiatives with regards to governance or business but not to culture or literature.
He further lamented that the kind of scholarship and intellectual debate that happened before printing was absent before content was uploaded online.
A recent book on criticism of the poems of Bendre collected only the opinions of some uninitiated young bloggers. It failed to notice scholarly criticism by greats like Keerthinath Kurtukoti, G.S. Amur or Giraddi Govindaraj.
“That is because we have less enthusiasm for digitising classics compared to the vigour in which present day literature is pushed to the Internet,” he said.
Beluru Sudarshan, open source activist, said that the Union government had launched Bharata Vani to create, archive and preserve content in various Indian languages. “We are trying to curate content in 121 languages. Of this, we have already uploaded 160 dictionaries in various languages and 42 application-based dictionaries,” Mr. Sudarshan said.
Similar success has been achieved by the Kanaja project of the State government and Tamil Virtual University.
Optimum utilisation of Kannada content through digital and online platforms and open source technologies should be the norm, he said.
He rejected claims that e-books could reduce the sale of printed books.
“A lot of content is generated by volunteers. Some languages that do not have their own script are thriving in the internet as their netizens are actively using other regional scripts to upload content,” he said. He urged for a policy framework and a blueprint for free and open source knowledge. “We also need to document and digitise native knowledge, folk knowledge and visual and performing arts. It should be made available on a public platform too,” Mr. Sudarshan added.
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