TNH-Scholar: Project Overview for Parallax Press & Plum Village Editorial Community¶
Overview for Parallax Press and Plum Village editors on the TNH-Scholar project vision, current capabilities, potential editorial benefits, and possible pathways of collaboration.
1. Purpose of This Document¶
This document provides a clear, non-technical introduction to the TNH‑Scholar project vision for members of Parallax Press and the Plum Village Editorial community. It outlines the project’s scope, current capabilities, potential value to Parallax Press, and areas where collaboration or guidance would be mutually beneficial.
2. Short Project Description¶
TNH‑Scholar is a long-term digital humanities and AI‑assisted research project dedicated to:
- preserving, organizing, and making searchable the collected works of Thầy,
- enabling semantic search and discovery across teachings through advanced retrieval techniques,
- supporting translation, annotation, and scholarship across Vietnamese, English, French, and other languages,
- developing tools for practitioners, educators, editors, researchers, and archivists,
- ensuring high accuracy, transparency, and lineage‑faithfulness through provenance tracking and human‑guided AI workflows.
The project has as its core a vision of creating a scholarly infrastructure, a set of tools that help people understand, translate, cross‑reference, and preserve the teachings with care.
Core aspirations:
- A clean, well‑structured, multilingual digital corpus
- Semantic search and discovery tools enabling practitioners and scholars to explore teachings thematically
- Tools for translation, metadata extraction, and scholarly indexing
- Research utilities for exploring teachings across decades and languages
- A foundation for future learning tools, training materials, and editorial workflows
The project intends deep respect for the lineage, careful stewardship of Thầy's teachings, and mindful use of AI technologies.
3. Benefits of the Project from an Editorial & Publishing Perspective¶
3.1 Support for Translation & Editing¶
- High‑accuracy draft translations with full provenance
- Sentence‑level alignment tools
- Automated glossaries for Buddhist and Plum Village terminology
- Tools for comparing versions across languages
3.2 Supporting Publication & Editorial Pathways¶
- A searchable corpus of all published (and historically significant unpublished) materials
- Semantic search capabilities for discovering related teachings, themes, and concepts across the corpus
- Automatic metadata extraction (e.g., footnotes, headings, quotes)
- Tools for preparing anthologies, themed collections, revised editions
- Detection of duplicated text or passages reused across books, talks, or letters
3.3 Archival & Preservation¶
- Clean digital text extracted from aging PDFs and scans
- OCR correction tools
- Structured digital formats for long-term storage
- Cross‑referencing of early journals, handwritten pieces, letters, Dharma talks
3.4 Accessibility & Community Benefit¶
- Resources for educators and sanghas
- Search and discovery tools enabling practitioners to explore teachings by theme, concept, or practice
- Study and research tools for practitioners
- Future bilingual interactive readers or teaching companions
- A foundation for future Plum Village digital learning platforms
Note on Search Development: A prototype sutra search tool is currently being developed at Deer Park Monastery, exploring approaches to searching and discovering teachings across multiple Buddhist corpora. TNH Scholar's knowledge base architecture (see ADR-K01) is designed to support similar search and retrieval capabilities as part of the scholarly infrastructure.
4. A Collaborative Vision with Parallax Press¶
Parallax Press is uniquely positioned to act as:
- A Beneficiary — tools that support editing, translation, and publishing.
- A Reviewer - helping to insure accuracy, fidelity, applicability
- A Contributor — access to high-quality source materials.
Possible engagement:
- A liaison or small support group
- Review of project direction documents
- Guidance on terminology, text selection
- Collaborative long-term vision for Plum Village’s digital future
5. High-Level Architecture (Non-Technical Overview)¶
TNH‑Scholar consists of:
5.1 A Clean, Structured Corpus¶
Digital text organized into:
- books, chapters, sections, paragraphs
- talks (audio and video), retreats, interviews, letters
- early journals (e.g., Vietnamese Buddhist Review collections)
5.2 Processing Flows¶
Tools for:
- OCR → clean text
- tagging metadata
- extracting headings, quotes, footnotes
- aligning translations
- classifying themes and concepts
5.3 A “GenAI Service”¶
A system that runs AI-powered tasks with:
- full transparency
- reproducible inputs
- strict provenance (never hidden)
- human review loops
5.4 User Interfaces¶
- command line tools for researchers
- Jupyter notebooks for analysis
- (future) semantic search interfaces for discovering teachings
- (future) VS Code tools for editors/translators
- (future) interactive web portals for reading/study
6. TNH‑Scholar Vision & Potential Impact¶
6.1 Background¶
For decades, Thầy produced a vast corpus of material across multiple languages and formats.
Much of this exists in:
- scanned documents
- partial digital manuscripts
- audio and video recordings
- older OCR with errors
- translations with varying conventions
- scattered archival sources
As scholarship grows, and as new generations seek to engage with these teachings, the need for a structured, unified, lineage‑transparent digital corpus manifests.
6.2 Goals of TNH‑Scholar¶
- Provide a faithful, structured representation of Thầy's teachings
- Enable search, discovery, and thematic exploration across the corpus using semantic retrieval and traditional search methods
- Support translation workflows with accuracy and style fidelity
- Offer scholarly infrastructure, not automated interpretation
- Ensure ethical, transparent AI usage firmly grounded in human oversight
- Preserve text for future generations in durable, well-defined digital formats
6.3 Editorial Benefits¶
- Faster first‑pass translation drafts with consistent terminology.
- Tools for polishing translations using side-by-side alignment.
- Reduction in manual OCR cleanup labor on old sources.
- Structured metadata enabling easier anthology creation.
- Support for future critical editions and chronology projects.
6.4 Community Benefits¶
- Practitioners gain indexed, searchable access to teachings across multiple languages and formats
- Semantic search enables discovery of related teachings, themes, and concepts
- Teachers gain bilingual tools for quoting or referencing materials
- Researchers gain deeper insight into historical development of themes and cross-linguistic connections
6.5 Long-Term Vision¶
The TNH‑Scholar system becomes the base layer of a future:
- Plum Village Digital Archive with advanced search and discovery capabilities
- Multilingual Study Companion enabling thematic exploration across languages
- Hermitage Research Tool for monastics with semantic search
- Teaching companion for Dharma instructors
- Preservation system for rare or fragile materials
7. Invitation for Collaboration¶
Request for the Parallax Press Team:
- Review the project’s principles and vision
- Explore possible collaboration
- Discuss mutual needs in publishing and digital preservation
- Consider a small advisory/feedback group
- Co-create a long-term roadmap for Plum Village digital infrastructure
With an aspiration for partnership, alignment, and mutual benefit.
8. Contact¶
Project Lead:
Aaron Solomon
aaron.kyle.solomon@gmail.com
(Deer Park Monastery)