This project shapes culture by digitally presenting and preserving cultural and religious material, making it accessible beyond its original setting. It changes how users engage with cultural material by allowing global access to content that would typically be in one location and lets users interpret and explore the material themselves.
The groups involved are scholars and researchers who displayed and explained the detailed content and structure. Students and learners are involved through being guided through the narratives and tools.
The Life of the Buddha. University of Virginia, https://dh.library.virginia.edu/projects/life-buddha
“LOTB is the first full-scale study of the life of the Buddha in a Tibetan setting. Scholars of Buddhist traditions in other regions of Asia have explored the synergies between Buddhist temple murals, narrative literature, and the architectural setting and ritual practices of the institutions that helped produce them. Such work has focused on, for example, sites at Ajanta in India, Dunhuang in China, and Borobudur in Indonesia. The unique Tibetan archive of visual and literary materials extant for Jonang allows us to explore issues such as the planning and design of visual narratives, the relationships between written and painted life stories, the economies of artistic production in a monastic setting, and forms of institutionally sponsored ritual consecration and worship.”
The cultural aspects include presentation of religious and visual storytelling traditions and the interpretation of meaning through imagery and narrative. To approach this, the project uses digitization and interactivity to represent cultural material, connecting visual culture with written explanation. This was a huge step for Buddhists who were able to have their culture visible, which was a driver of this project’s creation.