Lecture by Rachael M. Griffiths (EPHE)
Thursday November 13, 2025, 6 PM
at Maison de la recherche de l’Inalco (2, rue de Lille, 75007 Paris), room LO.01
and via Zoom (shorturl.at/kmvO1).
abstract:
In 2005, a large corpus of manuscripts was discovered in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands constituting the ritual repertoire of the Leyu (le’u) priests. Preliminary investigations suggest these texts contain non-Buddhist rituals and narratives resembling early sources from Dunhuang. This collection of approximately 100,000 manuscript pages forms the corpus currently investigated by the PaganTibet project, offering an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct pre-Buddhist Tibetan religious traditions. This talk examines how the PaganTibet project employs digital humanities approaches, particularly handwritten text recognition (HTR) and natural language processing (NLP) methods, to enable deeper textual analysis.
Rachael M. Griffiths is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project PaganTibet at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL. She received her MPhil and PhD from the University of Oxford, with research interests including Tibetan life writing and pilgrimage.