The Crimson Dusk theme is a nice touch too. Looking forward to seeing how the data coverage grows over time!
I’ve been working on a similar project for biblical texts. For example, here’s a character detail page for David: https://hypr.bible/en/entities/person/david/
I’m finding that character dictionaries like this are useful to people who want to engage with ancient texts but are not very familiar with them, but even if one is familiar, they are still quite helpful.
Right now the data isn’t directly modeled from primary sources like the Valmiki Ramayana or the Mahabharata. It’s an MVP built quickly using curated summaries, so the graph is definitely incomplete.
Planning to expand coverage and move towards a more accurate, source-grounded knowledge graph over time.
E.g. Laxman Rekha incident is not present in Valmiki Ramayana but is present in societal consciousness.
That's a view you get in every single book, and it looks really weird here. I feel like it's important to get this really basic stuff right before doing the cool-looking graph visuals.
- The default vis has very low contrast (despite changing theme colors).. perhaps make the contrast stronger. I find this is the case with most AI-driven websites :-/ Same for some of the standard text ("family lineage", "group connections, etc)
- Pls cite the sources. That would be useful / important
- The dynasty tree looks useful... But is it incomplete? Or is only the visualization capped at some limit?
- Wasn't sure what the "Sections" dropdown on the left does
The challenge for sure is about the sheer number of characters, the number of years/decades in these epics, the complexity.
Would love to see some references, perhaps with quotes in Sankskrit / transliterated to English, at key points. [yes, this is challenging, no doubt]
Hope this is useful
Keep up the good work!
It’s not a problem just for us Hindus either. I see so much terrible Jesus/angel “artwork” everywhere. It makes me start to wonder if maybe the Wahabbis were onto something with their complete taboo around depictions of God or the prophets.
South Asian religions are in an especially bad position because so many works related to them have never been digitized (and quite frankly, in some cases what's available on the internet is of extremely low quality) [1]. I'd be pretty concerned if someone were to rely on entirely on these models since the probability of hallucinations (or at the very least, erasure of regional/ideological diversity) probably skyrockets because the information was never actually there in the training data to begin with.
[1] I was able to find a few works of Newari Buddhist iconography recently, so it might be changing: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901130203/https://download..... It still has a few mistakes and doesn't compare to what's out there, though.
- what actually happened may not be what was written
- what was written 5000 yrs ago may not be what you are reading now. lots of people may have created their own versions or modified the original in ways you did not foresee
- the author who originally wrote the books may also have exaggerated for storytelling effect
- the probability of all of the above mathematically speaking is non zero
india vedic texts are passed through "oral tradition" where you recite same text backward and forward and through patterned permutations of words, if there is error it shows up, it's like redundant error-correcting encoding / repetition validation
- my point is that most people fail to consider the fact that there may have been major errors during the entire period of 5000 yrs
This with Amar Chitra Katha would be great.