The Vachana Sanchaya website, a repository of 12th century vachana literature of Karnataka, has had more than five lakh hits in the first couple of months of the platform’s launch.
Enthused by the response, the young team instrumental in launching the site is now ready to add advanced features and come up with repositories of this kind, of other writers of Kannada literature.
Its scope>Vachana Sanchaya has over 20,000 vachanas of 259 vachanakars.
Work has begun to further edit and expand the site with the help of a review desk comprising researchers. More repositories of writers will be featured under the umbrella project, ‘Kannada Sanchaya’ (http://kannada.sanchaya. net).
Omshivaprakash H.L., who leads the team, says that portals on the works of Sarvajna and poets of the Dasa tradition are in the pipeline.
The idea of the vachana website germinated about a year ago when writer Vasudhendra and vachana scholar O.L. Nagabhushanaswamy approached Mr. Omshivaprakash to explore the possibility of making vachana literature content already available in the government-run website searchable in Unicode to help researchers.
Since the site was not Unicode compliant, they decided to launch a different site that would serve as a research platform.
Since the site was not Unicode compliant, they decided to launch a different site. Mr. Omshivaprakash was joined in the project by fellow techies Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Devaraj K., with Mr. Vasudhendra and Prof. Nagabhushanaswamy guiding them.
It was an enormous task, including identifying unique words across all the 20,000 or more vachanas and indexing them. The site currently has about two lakh unique words in the repository.
This site is also accessible for the visually-challenged. People are now accessing vachanas from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels, Mr. Omshivaprakash says.
